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By Chris Meadows

MacRumors reports on a new (currently inactive) feature discovered in Safari builds for the next version of OS X, “Lion”. Called “Reading List”, it seems to work hand in hand with the Readability-based “Safari Reader” reformatting feature—allowing people to save web articles for later reading.

Some blogs have been calling this feature an “Instapaper competitor”, but Instapaper creator Marco Ament has posted to his own blog that he doesn’t see it quite that way, at least in the current version. He suggests it’s still more of a competitor to Readability, since there’s no sign it’s going to have cross-platform mobile and sync capabilities.

Even if they do add it in the future, Ament believes, it might have the effect of drawing more people to use Instapaper as they find they like the convenience of reading articles in that format but want the additional features only Instapaper can offer.

In any case, it’s interesting to see the explosion of web article reformatting capabilities appearing all over the place. Instapaper, Readability, Zite, Safari Reader/Reading List—it’s funny that it took so long to evolve from ad-blocking to readability-enhancement as a way of dealing with obnoxious advertising and bad pate formatting, but now that it has it seems almost like a movement.

 
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