Instapaper is pure liquid gold for the Kindle. Marco has definitely made the right choice to create a start-up based on it.
Right now I've got probably about a hundred articles on Instapaper, collected over the month or so I'm using it, but I haven't read any of them yet. My Kindle should arrive Monday and the first thing I'll do is read those articles on it.
One caveat - WhisperNet. Amazon aren't going to be keen on people buying Kindles, only to use their free cellular bandwidth to read blogs. Amazon have no interest in making hardware, it's just a means to an end, the end in question being the end of the publishing industry.
It bothers me a little bit that they are not opening the KDK for all people at the same time. Nevertheless, I expect to experiment with Kindle apps in the future (if they ever let normal guys into the developer program).
I guess I can understand that they want to test the waters with a brand name app, but now that they've actually published something the continued stinginess with the sdk is off-putting. Maybe one consolation is that, by the time they open it up to regular folk, there might be much better Kindles to play with.
"Major drawback: Unlike Facebook’s or other online iterations of the Scrabble game, there is no social dimension. You can’t play with another Kindle user online; the best you can do is set up a two-player game where you pass the Kindle back and forth."
This seems to me a major step-back. Someone knows if is this a choice made by Electronic Arts or is something imposed by Amazon?
Would really like to apply, but I want to build a reading application (expressly forbidden by their SDK agreement), because I've yet to see anything efficiently use E-ink displays, and their UIs are uniformly nasty. To the point where I've wondered if they're doing it deliberately, because it could mean relative-death to second-hand book sales.
