The just-hatched startup's first order of business was to do away with the cost-prohibitive $0.99-per-week fee and make the News.me iPad application free. The company is also promising a slew of application updates in the months ahead.
Two things to note: Existing News.me application users will need to download the new version of the application, and paying subscribers must manually discontinue their plans.
"News.me is on a mission to reinvent an industry -- to use what we’ve learned from the social web to make the discovery and consumption of news better," the News.me team said in a blog post.
For those playing catch-up, News.me was born inside the R&D lab at The New York Times and then incubated at Bitly, a Betaworks company. The application arrived on the App Store in mid-April to a mild reception, partly because free social news reading applications such as Flipboard were already proving popular with iPad users.
The application's hook, however, is its ability to provide users with a news-filtered view of their Twitter connections' streams. It also has a publisher-friendly mindset -- partners (Mashable was a launch parter) receive fixed fees for pageviews -- that will continue as News.me enters this new life stage.