For the past year, while Readability’s adoption and growth accelerated, we began thinking about how we wanted the core engine to evolve. Iris is the culmination of months of learning, re-architecting, design and development.

The foundational principle behind Iris is this: information on the web today exists in myriad contexts—and the sphere of differing contexts is growing. Iris is designed to untangle the web content you want and bring it forward.

The Context of Content

Much of the Readability engine’s success is attributed to the fact that a large portion of the reading web happens to share a common context: the article. It’s what we’ve focused on to date and we’re very proud of the work we’ve done there.

Still, today’s web includes far more than the generic article. Wikipedia is not just an article. A forum thread is not an article. A YouTube video, of course, is not an article. Not even articles themselves are all created equal.

With Iris, we’ve built an engine that you might call abstract—inspired by IBM’s Watson, the machine that beat contestants on Jeopardy!, Iris’ first order of business is to figure what type of content source is at hand. It analyzes a page, determines the likely context based on a number of factors and extracts what a human would expect as meaningful information from that source. Each context is fully malleable, and can be modified and improved upon individually.

This results in a dramatically improved user experience across the myriad apps, services and tools built on Readability. Expect better results on all sites, even non-article pages on sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, Vimeo and many more.

A Richer Readability Experience

Once the content type is determined, there’s still the complex task of knowing precisely what to tease out of a web resource. Even web articles—Readability’s wheelhouse—are comprised of much more than just a headline and body text. With Iris, Readability gains the ability to glean a whole new level of insight into what facets of a web resource matters to readers and developers: titles and headlines. Subheadlines. Lead images. Videos. Excerpts. Authors. Languages. Captions. Beyond just a great end-user experience, Iris represents a powerful bridge to the new ways content is being consumed beyond the browser.

Faster Engine, Faster Improvement

Finally, we wanted an engine that evolves and improves as quickly as the web. Rather than tethering improvements to software updates, Iris enjoys an extensible framework that allows for improvement from week to week and day to day. Users and developers will immediately benefit from updates—whether introducing support for new content types or better targeting.

As an added benefit, Iris is also significantly faster than the previous iteration, as determining a context before parsing allows us to skip a lot of unnecessary work. We’ll be able to scale the platform more effectively now, and that means a better experience for our users.

Live Now

Readers will start to see the benefits of Iris starting today. Developers will start to see the new fields (currently “dek” (subhead), leading image URL, text direction, and better content distillation including image captions) immediately and those fields will be populated over the next couple of weeks as we bring new contexts online.

We’re incredibly excited about this step in our growth as a platform. We couldn’t have made such dramatic strides without the fantastic developers and partners we’ve had long conversations with about the value and diversity of the web. We’re happy to provide all we can for the network we’ve become a part of.

With Readability’s newfound flexibility, we’re now in an even better position to work with publishers and developers to make sure their content looks absolutely impeccable within Readability. If that sounds like you, please get in touch.

Happy reading!

As part of Arc90—a small, Manhattan firm of passionate, design–driven technologists—we each wear many hats. Designers who code, engineers who invent, managers who ship. Working on Readability mixes product support with R&D—we operate as a hybrid of startup and client work: deadlines are real and the pace is quick. Whatever your passions, we give you room to grow.

The day-to-day involves a lot of emails, a lot of chat, and a lot of information. On our support team, you’ll liaison between the developers, project lead, and the wonderful folks at CoSupport, who tackle much of the inbox and offer guidance and expertise. You’ll be learning how the gears turn while helping delight our customers by improving the experience of reading for everyone.

In terms of skillset, we’re looking for someone who is:

• smart, motivated, organized and kind.
• particularly interested in reading and writing, particularly on the web. If you’re a fan of and familiar with Readability already, that’s even better. You can play well the role of evangelist (along with the rest of us!)
• a solid communicator, both written and verbal, and both technical and social. We need you to empathize with customers, write clearly, and effectively express patterns and technical issues to the team. Phrasing matters as much in our issues tracker as on Twitter.
• eager to understand and advocate for community ideas. You’ll organize issues users are having and help the team to prioritize them with an eye for for both small bugs and the big picture. Be the voice of users in a design meeting, of developers when we plan the roadmap, of publishers when we look at our long-term goals. Crucial: common sense and an openness to ideas that are not your own.
• comfortable with the web. You don’t need to be a coder, but you should know how the web works and love playing with new tools and software. You’ll look at a lot of web pages and it’s important to know (or be able to learn) the basics of how they work. HTML and CSS experience are a plus. If you know any XPath (gasp!), even better.
• pattern-aware. You’ll need to learn where to look for answers and have a knack for seeing when something repeats.
• able to advocate the brand without being a personality. Be comfortable on Twitter and Facebook and everywhere else. There’s no room for egos and no need for fights.
• living or willing to live in NYC or have a proven record of impeccable remote working. If you’re living in the United States, you are qualified to work here without sponsorship. (Sorry, we can’t currently sponsor H1–B candidates.)

It’d be a plus if you:

• know how apps work on iOS and Android. Installing, uninstalling, troubleshooting.
• are an Early-adopter. We do a lot of skunkworks-style playing around here, and admire someone motivated to look at what’s new.
• blog or have some other experience writing. Strong writing is very important for this role.

Excited? Sound interesting? Feel free to drop us a line at icanhelp@readability.com and include a resume and a note about yourself and why this strikes you as a good opportunity. We don’t necessarily need someone who has a ton of experience managing a community. A smart, kind, organized person who loves reading and the web would be a great fit.

1. We want more people to read great stuff on the web.
2. We want to evolve the model that supports the publishers who create that great work.
3. We want the experience of reading that work to be as pleasant and rewarding as possible.
4. We believe the fundamentals of publishing, writing and reading on the web are evolving rapidly.

How we consume things is changing and the original notion of “publish and consume in the web browser” is being challenged. What is clear from everyone’s experiments, including our own, is that the current reading experience isn’t as good as both writers and readers deserve. As we build innovative tools and products here at Readability, we think carefully about the decisions we make. We’re a small, independent, bootstrapped company, but we think we can have a big impact on how everyone reads. And we know it’s an important opportunity because we’re joined by a number of innovative companies, both big and small, who are all trying different ways to make this work.

Reading a web page in your web browser is simple enough, but the other ways we can work with that story today are nearly infinite. For example:

• If you send a tweeted link from your Twitter app to your Instapaper account, it lands there without you ever viewing the original web page.
• If you open just about any link in a news reading app like Zite, you will find the content of that article without ever viewing the original web page.
• If you turn on a mobilizer view in some popular Twitter clients, you will open a mobile view of a page without ever viewing the original web page.
• …and who knows what’s possible with the right combination of IFTTT and Pinboard and many other powerful, awesome apps that share, remix, store and reformat content.

We’re fortunate that people are passionate about this stuff, passionate enough to really get their emotions going. Even people who work in the same office as our Readability team have fallen into the mistaken belief that this is somehow a team sport where we have to choose sides between different apps. So it’s no wonder that even smart, thoughtful writers can say surprisingly vitriolic things with uncharacteristic thoughtlessness when writing about an area as exciting as this one.

Paying Publishers

We are immensely proud of one key part of our experiments with Readability so far: We cut checks to writers. And we want to cut more of them. We welcome more readers to pay and more publishers to register and claim their money. We take pride in being the first reading platform to try something this radical. Is our method of paying publishers the right one? Almost certainly not yet. If you’re a publisher and are uncomfortable for any reason, contact us and we’ll fix the issue.

We’re experimenting because we do not believe that, ten years from now, advertisers will be happily paying for CPM banner ads on a site that people leave to read in some other app. And we don’t believe that publishers will support over the long term paid apps which generate no revenue for the publisher. The model we’re experimenting with definitely has its challenges, and we’re going to be careful about how we handle change because we made a public promise by way of our model.

Above all else, we take great pride in what we are about. Many publishers have approached us with both words of encouragement and opportunities to work together. Countless developers have built a thriving ecosystem around the platform. These bridges have been built because we’ve gone about this endeavor with purpose, integrity and a profound belief in the words great writers write and the meaning that readers find in them.

We’ve got more great things to come as we look ahead. And by “we” we mean our partners and the amazing community that has embraced Readability. Stay tuned.

I’m proud to say that we’ve made our platform goal a reality. Even before our native iOS and Android apps were released, 90% of our reading traffic came through our APIs—from apps like Pulse, Reeder, Longform and others that heavily use our service. We’re proud to see others climb on our shoulders to make reading better and we’re excited to see what other apps, scripts, and services—large or small—will leverage the platform in the future. So what can you build with the Readability API?

• Leverage everything Readability has to offer and build entire full-featured clients on any platform or device.
• Deliver a simple and clean normalized reading view of any web article with Readability’s best-of-breed parser.
• Allow readers to send web URL’s to their reading list from anywhere.

Starting today, we’re lowering the bar to get started even further: anyone with a Readability user account can obtain an API key via their account settings page. (The astute Readability user might notice that this has been around for a couple of weeks. We would have announced this sooner, but we’ve had a lot of things to talk about lately.)

To generate your key, go to your Connections page while logged in to your Readability account and fill out the form describing your project. You’ll get your key immediately.

We’re happy to make it even easier to build on the full Readability feature set. Lowering the barrier for developer engagement is just a means to an end: to make reading better everywhere, both inside and out of Readability. We can’t wait to see what people build next.

Happy coding!

We’ve also heard your feedback and have already made some important updates to the app, including native sharing menus. More improvements are on the way.

Readability for Android is free and available now on Google Play.

From the start, we wanted the apps to be drop-dead gorgeous. And today we’re proud to announce that right on time for the new iPads, Readability has been updated and is available in the App Store in hi-res, retina-display-ready glory. If you’re on the fence about grabbing a new iPad, firing up Readability with its gorgeous typography and elegant interactions on the new iPad may well push you over the edge. We hate to say this in a blog post, but you really have to see it live.

Of course, Readability still works inside of a host of apps, including an amazing integration with the newly updated hi-res version of the Reeder app. And Readability renders perfectly well on all the previous generations of iPhones and iPads as well. If you already have the Readability app, don’t forget to upgrade. If you don’t, well you definitely don’t have an excuse now. It’s free and ready to go on the App Store.

As we’ve evolved from being crouched over our laptops to carrying full-fledged computers in our pockets, the reading experience has become increasingly mobile and flexible. We want to be a able to read — comfortably — whenever and wherever we are.
You can’t talk about mobile without recognizing the rise of the Android platform. We’re proud to announce the availability of Readability for Android devices and tablets. It’s a free Android app that scales beautifully to the Android device of your choice, large or small. It sports the same elegant get-out-of-the-way interface and gorgeous H&FJ typography that made Readability for iOS such a big hit.

It’s a free app built in partnership with our friends at Teehan+Lax. it’s exclusively available in the U.S. on the Amazon App Store. If you’re outside the U.S., you can get Readability on Google Play (formerly the Android Market).

Update: Readability is now available on Google Play in the U.S. and around to world. You can still also download on the Amazon App Store.

Readability at its core is a service and platform. Our goal is to make reading great on any platform, device or app, including our own. In that same spirit we’re thrilled to announce that Readability for Android devices will be available on Monday, March 12.

We went to great lengths to bring the same polished, content-centric experience in iOS to Android devices. It sports the same beautiful typography by Hoefler & Frere-Jones and even scales up nicely to handle larger Android devices like the Kindle Fire.

We’re convinced that Readability for Android will stand tall among Android apps. It’s a level of polish rarely seen on the platform and we can’t wait to get it into your hands on Monday.

But for all our success on Chrome and Firefox and IE, mobile and tablet browsers have remained tricky. You can install the Readability bookmarklets on your iPhone or iPad, but it’s cludgy, making browsing using Readability on iOS pretty rough…until now.

The newest version of iCab Mobile—a replacement web browser for iOS—brings the entire Readability feature set into your browsing experience.

You can read now, read later and access your Readability Reading List right inside the iCab browser. You can even sign up to Readability from within the app. It’s a great way to deeply integrate Readability into your web browsing experience on iOS.

iCab Mobile is yet another great example of how Readability can help enrich apps and services anywhere. It works on both your iPhone and iPad and is available on iTunes. We highly recommend it.

We wanted to create something that makes it as easy as possible to queue up and take web articles anywhere you go on your iPhone or iPad. Our guiding principle was simple: get out of the reader’s way. We hope you like it.

Readability is a free, universal app available on the iTunes App Store. What are you waiting for? Go get it!