Over a decade ago, services like Pocket and Instapaper emerged with a compelling promise: save anything you find on the internet and come back to it later. For a moment, this felt like magic. No more lost tabs or forgotten links, just a tidy list of things you intended to read. But fast-forward to today, and many users are finding that list has become more of a burden than a benefit. It’s a graveyard of good intentions rather than a springboard for discovery.
The internet has evolved. It’s faster, noisier, and infinitely more fragmented. We now consume content across TikTok, Instagram, Substack, Reddit, YouTube, and Twitter and often in a single hour. But the tools to make sense of it all have hardly kept up. Most “read-it-later” apps are still built on the assumption that the user will return, scroll, and do the mental labor of rediscovering. They organize, but they don’t connect. They store, but they don’t resurface. They save, but they don’t understand.
What’s missing is intelligence. Not in the form of algorithmic feeds or generic recommendations, but in the form of context-aware, personalized memory systems that don’t just collect your interests, but evolve with them. If “saving” is the highest signal of intent on the internet, something more meaningful than a like and more deliberate than a view, then why aren’t we doing more with it?
Recent advances in generative AI make this possible for the first time. Instead of static lists, we can imagine dynamic agents that learn from what we save, draw connections across disparate topics, and anticipate the things we might want next. We don’t just need more folders, we need companions that think with us. Curation isn’t a UX layer, it’s a data layer, and it’s a profoundly underutilized one.
The next chapter of read-it-later isn’t about “later” at all. It’s about creating an ambient layer on top of the internet, one that turns passive saving into active utility. One that remembers what we care about, reminds us why we cared, and recommends what’s worth caring about next.
It’s not just about saving content. It’s about using it to power smarter experiences.
That’s the future we’re building with Crate.