Share Articles With Your Friends Using Read-Later Services and Save-By-Email

If you're always on the lookout for new things to read, but you don't want to manually save every link your best friend sends you, you can create your own little network for Pocket, Readability, or Instapaper with the Save-by-Email function.

I'm always on the lookout for new things to read, and I really liked Instapaper's "Friends" function that lets you see what your friends have recently read and starred. Unfortunately, as a Readability user, I don't have access to this feature, and not all my friends use Instapaper anyway. Luckily, my brother and I figured out a fun alternative: give out your save-by-email address to people you trust.

Instapaper and Readability both give you a unique email address that, when sent links, will add those articles to your reading queue. So, my brother now has my Readability address, so he can send any article he thinks I'd like directly to my Readability queue, drastically decreasing the number of steps it takes to get an article from him to me. Pocket has a similar feature, but it requires you linking your email address to an account rather than creating a unique email for each person. So, if you both use Pocket, this might not work the way you want it to (but for one non-Pocket user to another, it works fine).

Depending on what service you and your friends use, it can be a fun new way to stumble on articles—much easier than having them manually send you stuff via email, Facebook, or whatever else they used to do. Of course, you only want to do this with people you trust, otherwise you'll just end up cluttering your queue.