One of the great things about the internet is that it’s now easier than ever to find great long-form writing that would have been locked up inside different magazine silos not too long ago. People who only subscribed to Harper’s and Time would end up missing out on something great from The New Yorker, and might not even know that they were missing it.
But now, readers on the internet face another problem: there’s too much content out there to follow. Even as a self-proclaimed news junkie, I’m using no fewer than three social networks, one read-it-later service and a social bookmarking service to bring in and track all of my online reading habits.
Longform, named after the website of the same name, is designed to give readers with iPhones and iPads easy access to great writing by a variety of authors and publications without having to jump through all the hoops.
Users sign up for a Longreads account, and can then choose to follow their favorite outlets like Pitchfork, Matter, Mother Jones and Bloomberg Businessweek, as well as writers like Mac McClelland, Brad Stone and danah boyd. When those outlets and writers release something new, the app is supposed to collect them into a feed that users can read through so that they don’t miss something they’re going to like. (In my experience, the feed hasn’t worked for some reason.)
When a user taps on a story that they find interesting, Longform will first open it in a web view, directly from the publication’s website. Users can then swipe to the left and view the article in a streamlined “Read” view on websites that allow it. (Notably, it wasn’t possible for me to do that on any of the New York Times articles that I read.)
In either mode, Longform plays second fiddle to the content, basically acting as a wrapper for people to interact with what they want to read. Honestly, that’s how it should be: I don’t need an additional layer of crap getting in the way of the stories I want to read.
Thanks to iOS 8’s support for extensions, it’s also possible for people to just use Longform as a service for finding interesting articles, and then funnel the ones they want into a read-it-later service like Instapaper or Pocket.
The app’s biggest selling point is that it makes it easy for everyone to pick up the reading habits of a news junkie like me without requiring them to spend time chaining services services together. In that regard, Longform is incredibly successful: I know I could set anyone in my life down with the app, and they’d be able to get reading without any kind of trouble.
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However, that also highlights one of the shortcomings I see with Longform: its functionality doesn’t fit my power user workflows. For example, there’s no way for me to automatically back up what I’ve read outside of the service. Sure, the app keeps a history of everything that I’ve seen, but I’d prefer a solution that automatically sends everything off to a bookmarking service like Pinboard.
In a similar vein, I already have a massive archive of articles that I have read and liked through other services, and I’d like to have some way of using that data to drive the app’s recommendations. Admittedly, these are power user problems that most average folks won’t take issue with in regular use of the Longform app.
For those people, I’d recommend Longform without reservation – it’s a great way to stay up to date and find good content to enjoy.
Longform is available for free from the App Store.
