The Safari reader functionality aims to make long articles on the web easier and more fun to read. It does this by only displaying the essence of the article, that is, the text and related media such as images and video. It displays this in a way that resembles paper, around the edges of the paper you can see the original website dimmed down so you can focus on the article. I find this very useful because on normal webpages I tend to get distracted by ads, menus and what have you. By clicking the little Reader button in the address-bar, this all disappears.

Safari Reader in action on NY Times website

Now the question is, how does Safari detect where to display the reader button and which part of the website is the actual article. I can tell you from my experience that it does both things quite well. Though it sometimes doesn’t display the reader button when an article is there, it does so most of the time and it always picks the right content to display. Over at the Dutch forums of onemorething.nl I asked members how this worked and got a pretty good answer.

PS: You can also use the reader function on my blog when viewing a blogpost on its dedicated page, try it out!

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So here’s the thing: if I ask a random iTunes user if iTunes has Twitter and Facebook integration, would they say ‘yes’ or ‘no’? They’ll probably say no and I think they’re right in doing so. Some – Apple employees and iTunes developers – will say yes, because indeed iTunes has some functionality that integrates with Twitter and Facebook. So it is there? It’s indeed there, be it in a very user unfriendly way in a very well hidden place inside the iTunes Store.

This is what iTunes does right now: it allows you to share an album or a song you see in the iTunes Store by clicking a little arrow which presents you with a menu, which then gives you the option to click on Twitter or Facebook. Now don’t expect iTunes to use the API, it just sends you to the twitter page and fills in the box for you.

Current crappy Twitter and Facebook 'integration'

I wonder, what moron chose to do it this way, who would ever think that this would qualify as proper integration with a social website?

What it should be

So what should this ‘integration’ be? I think iTunes could use an integration that lets you share or ‘tweet’ what you’re listening on Twitter or Facebook by a click of the button. An other way to share a bit of your ‘tunes taste’ is the ability to recommend a song through Twitter or Facebook (Last.fm would be great too) by just right clicking a song and clicking share (this could also apply to albums, podcasts, etc).

iTunes could easily use the Facebook and Twitter API’s for this. In fact, I think it could be programmed in less then a week.

It would be a great boost for the iTunes player if you ask me, knowing that stuff like this is already available in the so-called ‘iTunes killer’ Songbird. And I also want to mention that if Apple were to decide to do this the right way, they’d probably do it in a more innovative way. they would do it better than I just described.

If you’ve got some related ideas of your own, please do share them in the comments section.

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