Read It Later Now Goes Beyond Paywalls, Supports Tweet Attribution

Today is a good day for online services aimed at letting users read content from the web. After the big news that Readability is launching a subscription service and it’s teaming up with Instapaper, Read It Later has just announced the release of an updated version of its official iOS app for iPhone and iPad, which reaches version 2.4.

The path towards the much anticipated Read It Later 3.0 starts with the possibility to access websites behind a pay wall. The problem with apps like Instapaper and Read It Later, in fact, is that subscription-based websites like the Wall Street Journal and ESPN Insider don’t support these tools out of the box, nor do they easily accept the fact that an online application is used to access their content in an uncluttered, ad-free layout. So it’s been a problem for developers to find a way to let users keep using their favorite reading tools, whilst keeping the access to the pay wall active. The solution implemented in Read It Later 2.4 is simple and genius: there’s an account manager to create, save and organize all your logins to subscription-based sources.

To manage your site accounts and subscriptions, open the new account manager in the options screen.  Then, simply select the sites you have accounts for, enter your account information and voilà, you’ll be able to access your content in Read It Later, even offline.  There are no limits to where/how you can save your content.  You can continue to save with the bookmarklet, extensions, and through third-party Twitter or news apps.

Another huge feature in this update is support for tweet attribution. With Read It Later, you can save links from Twitter with clients that support the platform. Now Read It Later will display the original tweet and author, time stamp and possibility to retweet the message without leaving the app. This new feature is exclusive to the Pro version of Read It Later and we think it’s very neat as it provides simple Twitter integration and finally allows users to get more information on content coming from the social network. Proper attribution has always been a problem in apps that fetch articles from webpages; now Read It Later not only does attribute from regular websites, it also credits authors of regular tweets. Very cool.

The 2.4 update also includes a series of bug fixes and support for articles suggested by #longreads – the same service that easily plugs into Instapaper. You can download Read It Later Pro at $2.99 in the App Store.