Like Instapaper, Readability scrapes text from web pages and strips it of ads and tangential content for a more pleasant reading experience on the iPhone, iPad, Nook or Kindle. “First, we wanted to better distinguish the difference between having access to features and supporting content creation,” CTO Chris Dary wrote on the Readability blog.“Second, we wanted to keep Readability as open as possible so that third-party integrators to our service can access all of our features as well, without limitations.”

Readability distinguishes itself from Instapaper by shuttling subscription fees back to publishers. The subscription fee is now optional, and "the dollars you can now optionally pay are purely for supporting us and writers." No premium, no freemium; just a suggested donation.

Last year Readability got into a tiff with Apple, which before then had loved Readability so much it integrated the technology into Safari, after the App Store policy changed to disallow subscription-based apps that did not use Apple's in-app purchase system. Making the app free is one way to get around the problem.

Rich Ziade

You might not be a readability user, but chances are if you're a tablet owner, you're relying on their technology everyday.

"It's a very popular tool," says Rich Ziade, founder partner of Readability, about the text parsing tool the company developed under the Apache license. "When you're on an device from Apple or Amazon and you click through to the article view, that's Readability you're using."

Does he regret that his small startup won't ever benefit from licensing fees these large tech giants could easily afford to pay? "I try not to dwell on the past," said Mr. Ziade with a wry chuckle. "I think we're still at the beginning of this movement towards a more readable web." 

The movement, as Mr. Ziade sees it, is one that favors long form content, strives to make reading on the web as pleasurable as possible, and rewards publishers for the content they create, no matter where and when it is consumed. Readability currently splits subscription fees 70-30 with publishers who sign up for their platform.

"We're working on what I like to call the "slow" web." Mr. Ziade said. "I see Marco Arment as one of the pioneers of this movement. The Atavist is another. It's a kind of counter-culture to the high speed pace of internet publishing."

Readability has always had a premium and free version, but wasn't seeing the kind of growth it needed to get to scale. So now its foregrounding its free service and hoping that after users get familiar with Readability they will upgrade to premium and pay a subscription fee.

Mr. Ziade says Readability receives 5-10 requests from developers each week interested in using their API and has a big announcement coming tomorrow night with their first prominent developer partnerships. "Apple and Amazon are building these walled gardens on their platforms that they tell publishers will help them finally monetize. We want to do the same thing, but work on the open web."

Taking as his starting point Instapaper and Readability, two New York apps enjoying growing success, Koczon identifies the notion of content shifting, taking an article or image from one place and with a single click, making it accessible in a completely different environment.

What this process opens up is the "looming question" of copyright and control. How should creators be rewarded for bringing new music, film or ideas into the world?

One interesting idea is what Koczon dubs the API of you. In much the way that Readability aims to share its proceeds with the publishers from whom it curates articles, one can imagine a world in which better attribution and metadata allow for bits to be monetized as they flow from user to user, app to app.

This is thought provoking stuff, but there is little to suggest that as media moves in this direction, a workable system for rewarding creators is emerging. Perhaps Koczon's upcoming project, the Gimmie Bar, can deliver a few suggestions.

Panorama by @UrgentCareer

Wednesday night's New York Tech Meetup came in three minutes under the two hour limit, which was amazing considering there were 11 demos, a hack of the month, several announcements and a speech by new managing director Jessica Lawrence on the agenda, interspersed with midi-rendered Weezer songs that the 800 or so audience members mumbled along to under their breaths in the red seats of NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. 

There was no Livestream, which will surely be one of the common complaints that will be directed at its new managing director, who was introduced midway through the event by Chairman Andrew Rasiej. The New York Tech Meetup has been run entirely by volunteers until now, he reminded the audience. "People ask, 'How come you aren't doing this? How come you aren't doing that?' Well the reason is because we all have day jobs," he said.

The organization received more than 40 applications for the position, he said.

Ms. Lawrence then got on stage, fresh from a TechCrunch interview, to present herself to members as the organization's first paid staffer. She introduced herself as the former organizer of a slow-moving Girl Scout organization who attended her first NYTM just two months ago. "I was literally on a plane, one way ticket in hand, L.A. to New York, when I registered for New York Tech Meetup," she told the audience. She gave out her email address, asked members to invite her to their work spaces and pledged to learn how to code.

Other announcements included Sanford Dickert's Collabracode project, a six week program for intermediate and advanced hackers to hone their skills; the NYC Startup Job Fair, happening Friday; and Code for a Cure, a hackathon to aid cancer research presented by NY Hacker.

Demo highlights:

BIGGEST PIVOT. Y Combinator alum MessageParty relaunched from being a GroupMe competitor to being a Foursquare competitor. The new MessageParty is location-based blogging, co-founder Amanda Peyton explained, which uses rich media to create a place page with more personality and context than Foursquare tips or a Yelp page. The pitch intrigued some members of the audience, who had several questions for Ms. Peyton (Will negative content be censored? No, and Is it possible to look at the page for a place remotely? It will be) and tweeted approvingly.

HACKIEST HACK. The Lemonade Stand, an app designed to replace the "for sale" section of Craigslist produced during the New York Startup Bus hackathon and still going strong with at least three committed team members. They're bootstrapping the project and hope to have a stable Android app by next month. Co-founder Jon Gottfried did some live coding, which frightened director Nate Westheimer and the audience but ultimately impressed.

CONTEST. Readability, arguably the purdiest and most advanced of all the demo'ing start-ups, announced an A.P.I. contest. $5,000 to the winner, $2,500 for the runner-up and $1,000 for third place. The hacks are due May 15.

SWAG. Runens made a good case for how running apps should be built with an intuitive, graphical interface and an emphasis on the social side of exercise. The audience was bubbling with questions. Do they save GPS data? Yes. Will it work for a treadmill? No plans for that, because the emphasis is on linking up with other runners. Will they make a version for cyclists? Probably, but they're focusing on runners first.

AWW. MeeGenius is an app for digital books for kids. Personalize a book with your kid's name, record your voice for the nights you can't be around, or have the book read itself to your child in a computerized voice that resonates from the depths of the uncanny valley. The audience lurved it. It'd be perfect for military families, someone suggested.

Other demos included: Corkboard.me, an internet corkboard; Ex.Fm, the browser extension that remembers the location of every music file you find in the course of regular browsing; Addieu, an app for instantly plugging new acquaintances into your social networks; ImUp4, an app that predicts social plans and encourages friends to join; Atavist, a digital publishing platform; BrainScape, a web and mobile app for flashcard-based learning; and AskLocal, the first presenter, which Betabeat regretfully admits we missed. We heard it's an iPhone app for sending messages to locations rather than people.

AdKeeper's 'Keep' button makes sense for coupons and meme-y ads.

This week in New York start-ups:

ADSTRUC WANTS YOU. The company that made it onto Betabeat's list of 10 Disruptive New York Start-Ups for giving outdoor billboard advertising the Adsense treatment is looking for a front-end dev.

TUMBLR DOWN. That is all.

FOURSQUARE STOPPING UP THE CRACKS. Foursquare went all https:// today, a process that started more than seven months ago. The more secure protocol will safeguard users against simple hacks like Firesheep, a Firefox plugin released in the fall that made it easy even for non-hackers to steal passwords submitted over an unencrypted connection. To be fair to Tumblr, Betabeat did notice that Foursquare's servers were down earlier today as well.

ROCK THE SKIRBALL. Also tonight! At New York Tech Meetup! Brand new managing director Jessica Lawrence will speak and more press than usual will be there. Companies presenting include Ex.Fm (awesome!), Readability (awesome!), IMUP4 (meh), MessageParty (meh UPDATE: MessageParty will be presenting a total pivot), and some ones we've never heard of: Runens, RezScore, Ask Local, BrainScape, MeeGenius, Corkboard.me.

FACTS. Startup Bus company The Lemonade Stand is also presenting at tonight's New York Tech Meetup for the NY Hacker Hack of the Month portion of the event. Jonathon Gottfried will demo. He is 20 years old.

UPSTARTS. The first official meeting of the Silicon Alley Job Fair, formed after the New York Startup Job Fair semi-publicly snubbed some 60 companies will come to order tonight, and 95 people have registered to attend. The meeting is at 160 Varick Street, 12th Floor at 5:30 p.m. Deadline to register is 4 p.m.

THE KEEPER. AdKeeper CEO Scott Kurnit says he's secured about 20 percent of the all the available internet advertising inventory, including ads from Pepsi, which committed 100 percent of its ads starting in May, MediaPost reports. "In the first five weeks since public release on February 14th, AdKeeper’s technology has run on more than thirty thousand unique websites, an unprecedented response to a new advertising technology," a release said. Some, like Betabeat's Ben Popper, are extremely skeptical of the idea of building a business on a "read it later" button for advertisements, but this reporter thinks it's like so crazy it just might work! Especially when you consider that PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET ARE CRAZY. It'll mean advertisers will have to make more entertaining ads, but why can't all the internet's mememakers on /b/, Reddit and so on go work in the advertising industry? Reddit has a "Reddit This" button on their ads.

Thanks for tuning in, guys! This has been your Wednesday afternoon Betabeat New York Tech News Start-Up Rundown, brought to you by iced dirty chai.

Not fair, Readability cried, loudly, in an open letter yesterday that said the new policy "smacks of greed." Apple wants a 30 percent cut of all purchases made after the initial purchase of the app, whether it's "content, functionality or services."

In the rejection, Apple seemed to group any app that tries to deliver extra, subscription-based functionality for users—including Readability, its cousin Instapaper, and apps like Dropbox, Evernote, LinkedIn and others—with content-based subscription apps. The former type is referred to as "software as a service" or the more obtuse "SaaS."

But wait! One frustrated developer emailed Mr. Jobs directly and reportedly received a reply: "We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps."

An answer from Steve! But what does it mean?

From Instapaper's Marco Arment:

The response fits his style, so I'd say it's likely that it's real. It doesn't really answer the question, though.

He only said that Apple didn't create the subscriptions for SaaS apps, not whether SaaS apps can use them (are we prohibited from using them?), or whether we're required to use them...

Why don't the published guidelines reflect this clarification, and what's stopping whoever gets your submission on the App Review team from following the literal definition?

The rule as stated, encompassing "content, functionality, or services", sounds like it includes SaaS apps by any remotely straightforward interpretation.

Sounds like trouble in the house of Apple. In other news, is there any terminology other than "Saas"? It really kills a headline.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries