Readability is a browser bookmarklet from arc90.com that allows you to strip away ads and clutter unrelated to the content you are actually interested in reading. It doesn’t work on all sites, but it’s free and easy to install on most browsers. You can customize the page layout style, the font size, and the margin sizes. Soon it won’t just be Rupert Murdoch whining about not being paid to produce content, even lowly blogs supported by ads will have the rug pulled out from under them. Ah the changing tech landscape… Here’s a way to quiet the page when you are writing, too.

Readability : An Arc90 Lab Experiment from Arc90 on Vimeo.

“Our audience is the platform developers get access to,” says Cody Simms, senior director of product management for Yahoo’s Open Strategy initiative.

So Yahoo is finally opening up to third-party developers, to encourage visitors to the ‘most popular home page in the world’ to embrace the idea of personalized functionality, just as they do on mobile devices, or Facebook for that matter. It will be a ’self-service’ process via the year-old Yahoo Application Platform.

The idea of getting even the least tech-savvy users to control their own user experience is a compelling challenge for both Yahoo! and apps developers. 123 million unique visitors/mo (Quantcast) should be an enormously attractive reason for dev types to look at this. I just can’t understand why it took Yahoo! so long.

Go to the Yahoo home page section of the Application Platform’s Web site, if you’re ready to take the challenge.

I’ve been wondering lately how much you improve the user experience by adding complexity to existing software. Does every further iteration, however Rich and immersive, necessarily help people do the tasks for which they are using software in the first place? Maybe it’s heresy, I know.

Here’s a well-argued post questioning extraneous further refinement in applications that work, from Neil Middleton. Using MS Word as an example, he asks simple: did you upgrade to Word 2008, and what features persuaded you to do so? Let’s face it, there were only a few new features, and with all the unused functionality in Word now, one has to wonder how excited people really were about the release. Can Microsoft be unaware of this?

Adobe recently bought Omniture and Omniture’s web monetization technology, ostensibly to help Adobe to monetize web content created with Adobe’s software suite, and on the surface it seems a likely enough fit. I wrote a post arguing that it’s driven by Adobe’s realization that future versions of their software tools might not enjoy the same growth in revenue generation as they have until this point. Diversifying into other revenue generators is a necessity, not a choice, for this reason. Are we on the cusp of mass acquisitions from entrenched companies who see that using their cash to add to their corporate focus might be one way out of this?

Someone said that part of Twitter’s success is the ‘ambient intimacy‘ that it conveys. If you find yourself drowning in all that ambience, you might try Twitter For Busy People. Magnificent simplicity. Up to 500 people you follow are represented as thumbnails on a single page; hover over a thumbnail and you see their latest tweet. Click and get their last 25 tweets. The most active are at the top of the page.
The beauty here is in the simplicity. No registration, and if you want to scan through many people you follow you don’t even click/wait. A study in usability.

From Andy Clarke over at forabeautifulweb.com comes a pragmatic approach for ‘the Internet Explorer 6 question’ as he delicately puts it. If you’re interested in Usability as an applied science, you’ll be interested in this, and if you aren’t, well, for whom are you designing? (Interesting debate in the comments too, springing predictably from skepticism as to how this can be sold to clients!)