Instapaper, a new site by Tumblr employee Marco Arment, simply put will easily be one of the websites I visit most this year. It may very well be the easiest and most beautifully minimal bookmarking site ever created. Let me give a brief history of my arduous experience with bookmarking.

At one point years ago I did all my web bookmarking through browser bookmarks – including stories I wanted to read later. This was clunky, slow and inefficient for anything other than an actual site you planned of visiting a lot.

I was very happy about the rise of del.icio.us which not only make things faster, it made a bookmark available to you not matter what computer you were on – but I still found the process a bit cumbersome.

Eventually I started using Digg as a kind of bookmarking site, digging things to read later, but that of course is not the intended use of Digg and Digg’s increasingly slow load times eventually rendered that inefficient as well.

Then came Google Reader, which brilliantly brought the ’star’ feature over from Gmail for items to read later, however this had two problems: 1) I had to be subscribed to a feed to save something to read later and 2) I eventually was starring so many things that it became impossible to go back and read them all. As such I started using the ’share’ function to mark stories that I really wanted to read later, but this method lost its practicality when Shared Items actually started to become useful with Reader’s social elements.

So I went back to using del.icio.us via their bookmarklet, which was nice, but still in my opinion rather cumbersome for what I need. This is where Instapaper comes in. You create a user name (can be a name or an email, doesn’t matter) – and that’s it, you’re ready to go. Notice I didn’t say you pick a password. You can create a password if you want, but you don’t need to. You then simply drag Instapaper’s “Read Later” bookmarklet into your browser and you now have the most simple bookmarking program out there.

You come upon an article you might want to read later, you hit the bookmarklet, a box briefly pops up to tell you ‘Saved!’ and that’s it. No redirects, no logins, no tags, nothing. When you go back to Instapaper your bookmarked page is there under the ‘Unread’ area with whatever title the article had. From here you can either click to go back to the story (at which point the link will be moved to a ‘Recently read’ area) or you hit a button to skip it – which will place the item down below in the ‘Recently skipped’ area. You can also edit a stories attributes if you really don’t like the title, put in the wrong URL, or want to put in a summary. Along these lines you can manually add a bookmark here as well, but that is already making the service seem more complicated than it is.

It’s one-click bookmarking. It’s exactly what I’ve wanted. It’s so simple, it’s ingenious. Sometimes I don’t care about sharing or tagging, I just want to bookmark a story so that I remember to read it later. That is exactly what Instapaper does. Definitely check it out.

[via SAI and Jakob Lodwick]