Readability is kicking off their brand new service today with some significant changes. Most notably: their membership subscription model.

You can become a subscribing member to Readability for $5/month or more. And as a member, 70% of your subscription payment gets divided up and given to the sites you read using Readability. If you invoke the Readability button on a site to or save it to your Reading List then that domain name is earmarked and the publisher of that site gets a portion of your subscription payment. If you’re a publisher, in order to get paid by Readability you have to opt in and register your domain.

Moreover, Readability now has a mobile app which was custom built by Marco and is based heavily on Instapaper. And Marco will soon be hooking Instapaper itself to your account on Readability so that publishers you read in Instapaper will receive credit as well. Meaning, in the near future, if you want to support the sites you read you don’t have to quit using Instapaper.

Readability’s subscription model is a fantastic idea. I’ve already signed up.

However, I’m curious how the model will pan out for supporting the smaller, independent publishers. It seems to me that the sites which I most want my 70% subscription payment to go to are the sites which are already optimized for reading on the web. Or, put another way, the sites I am least likely to read using Readability are exactly the sites I want to support.

I saw this poster at Denver International Airport when I was flying home last month for Christmas. It’s an advertisement for Colorado Mountain College. To find them online they give you the suggested search term instead of an actual Web address. Just like the trend Cabel Sasser saw while in Japan back in 2008.

As good URLs become more and more rare, how long until this is common place?

Speaking of interviews, Michael Lopp’s recent interview with Marco Arment is fantastic. Marco shares a lot of info and backstory about Instapaper, plus this fantastic bit of business advice:

The biggest design decision I’ve made is more of a continuous philosophy: do as few extremely time-consuming features as possible. As a result, Instapaper is a collection of a bunch of very easy things and only a handful of semi-hard things.

This philosophy sounds simple, but it isn’t: geeks like us are always tempted to implement very complex, never-ending features because they’re academically or algorithmically interesting, or because they can add massive value if done well, such as speech or handwriting recognition, recommendation engines, or natural-language processing.

These features — often very easy for people but very hard for computers — often produce mediocre-at-best results, are never truly finished, and usually require massive time investments to achieve incremental progress with diminishing returns.

If a one-person company is going to build a product, it can’t have any of those huge time-sink features. At most, I can afford to have one or two components of moderate complexity, such as the HTML-to-body-text parser and the Kindle-format writer. But even those are barely worth the time that I put into them.

You know that free over-the-air syncing server that Omni Group offers its users? It’s running on a Mac Mini and is doing just fine.

Ian Hines, the man with the original idea for OmniFocus Aid, talks briefly about the business model of the whole idea:

The obvious concern from OmniGroup’s perspective is that offering a “lite” version would hurt overall OmniFocus for Mac sales.

I think Ian’s conclusion is spot on. In that, having a low-cost utility like this would ultimately increase adoption of the OmniFocus suite more than it would decrease sales of the desktop app.

On another note, a lot of people are suggesting it be called OmniFocus Lite. But I think that’s a bad term and allows for too much scope creep of the project. Calling it OmniFocus Lite would imply that it more or less should offer you all the same access to your tasks and projects that OmniFocus does, but with less features.

The whole foundation of this simple utility is that it needs to be act as an assistant. It would be meant for those who use OmniFocus on their iPad as the main version, as well as those who work a lot from a non-Mac computer.

Regarding the usefulness of “OmniFocus Aid” for windows users, Michael Doan shares his workflow for how he gets by without OmniFocus at his work computer.

This week’s RSS feed was brought to you by Due, a fantastic timer and reminder app for the iPhone. You can set reminders for yourself for things which need to be done at a certain time, and you can save common timers. For instance, I use Due just about every day as the timer for my French Press. Also, for power naps.

The latest version of Due added over-the-air sync via Dropbox. If you’ve got the app installed on multiple devices it will sync your timers and reminders.

For further praise of Due, check out Dave Caolo’s three reasons why you should use it.