Decluttering the web, Readability and new revenues
Page loading speed, readability and efficiency have all been topics of debate here in the last six months, driven by great work by some of our architects. This is, I think, A Good Thing. It’s both good site hygiene. Increasing broadband speeds have made many people complacent about how their sites perform, while, at the same time, there’s a growing movement amongst the more savvy website builders to streamline their sites. Blogs have been through a cycle from one sidebar to multiple sidebars, and slowly back to one, or even none. Indeed, I’m planning to revamp this blog with a much cleaner design sometime in the next couple of months.
However, the real giveaway that something is becoming a trend on the web is that people are starting to build products to solve the problem. I’ve noted [Safari’s new Reader view before](http://www.onemanandhisblog.com/archives/2010/06/a_readers_safari.html), and am a regular user of [Instapaper](http://www.instapaper.com/u). The core technology underlying Reader – [Readability](https://www.readability.com/) – has evolved further. Anil Dash has published a long post [looking at Readibility](http://dashes.com/anil/2011/02/reading-is-fundamental.html), its ability to enforce clean design on cluttered sites, and a business model attached to it. Here’s a video giving a broad overview:
[Readability – Enjoy Reading, Support Writing](http://vimeo.com/19267888) from [Arc90](http://vimeo.com/arc90) on [Vimeo](http://vimeo.com).
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