Dave Winer has turned his attention to making mobile content easier to deal with. If you are the kind of person who’s always reading websites on a mobile device and curse the slow load times, complete lack of formatting, and other problems, you’ll want to save a few of these bookmarks on your phone.
Check out NYTimes, BBC and TechCrunch in Dave’s new, stripped down format. I’ve been reading TechCrunch this way on my phone for a couple of weeks. Most of the graphics and (sniff) all of the advertising is stripped out, but at least it keeps the reader sane.
Dave isn’t the first to create mobile versions of websites. Winksite, Skweezer and Google, among others, have their own products. Skweezer is particularly cool because it converts any website on the fly. And in some ways its better than Dave’s sites because it also shows comments on a blog, and throws in the advertising, but at the very bottom. This is important to keep the site owners happy and also to make sure you aren’t violating copyright laws.
But if you want to just store a couple of quick bookmarks for a daily read, Dave’s solution may be right for you. See Om Malik’s thoughts on this as well.
And tomorrow look for him to announce a new mobile blogging tool called YoMoBlog. Go to the site, type in your blog credentials and create a quick post on the fly. All of the major blogging platforms offer the ability to post on a blog via a unique email address…but if you are on a smaller platform this might be a good tool for you to use.
As usual with Dave, his first iterations are just tangible reflections of his imagination. He builds and launches software fast, then goes back and fills in the holes. Look for these tools to evolve as well, and hopefully stay on the right side of copyright law.
what is the best max width to use if you were to design a section of your site just for mobile viewers? Also… are there any tools that you can use to direct mobile users automatically to the section of your site designed for that veiwer base?
I am heavy mobile user , i have used most of these tools , and end up using Opera browser with images turned off.
Another great mobile application is widsets (http://www.widsets.com). I’ve test it a the beginning, being just curious, but now I use it regularly. You can kind of drag and drop modules to your phone. It has one module for Techcrunch, for technorati, for flickr… I think with such applications we will more and more move to the mobile world.
I brought an innovative idea and developped it 1 year ago for my former employer, a mobile provider. The principle was to be able to publish / share with your mobile phone without changing your habits. ONE NUMBER for everything:
- Call it, the result will be a podcast,
- SMS it the result is a blog post,
- MMS it the result is a gallery,
- VideoCall it (yes that was cool!) the result is a movies.
Everything was automated, easy to use, even for my mother! You know how to use a phone, you know how to publish on hte web.
I still have the prototype based on wordpress… Anyone interested in helping me not letting it sleep somewhere on a local server?
Opera with images turned off is also my first choice, but one of my friends developed a little app called Phonifier, http://www.phonifier.com, which can also be used as an optimalisator both for websites and rss-feeds. It’s free to use web-based and the code’s open source for anyone to use and modify. Already several thousand URL’s are phonified on a daily basis.
Phonifier was developed as a part of the Shotcode software of Swedisch start-up OP3, http://www.shotcode.com, and later launched as a stand-alone open source product.
Hope this will be of interest to you, give it a try if you’d like!
I’m not sure why they’ve done the BBC site. The BBC offers a text only version themselves.
Something similiar is available at: http://www.tiggdo.com
You can personalise the BBC news, upload OPML files etc on your handset.
http://www.xfruits.com offers good mobile feeds. I personally find them very well formatted with the width trimmed down.
There’s a Dutch project that has being doing the same thing for some time now:
http://www.phonifier.com/
You can make any website mobile-compatible with 8 lines of PHP code (obstart).
I don’t understand what he is trying to achieve here. Doesn’t Opera Mini do all of this for you? Arn’t there RSS readers for phones?
Jason, et al — I appreciate the coverage from Mike, Om and Staci, etc, but they didn’t explain these mobile sites very well imho. Glad to have the ability to comment here, to elaborate.
First, pay no attention to the mobile version of TechCrunch. There are plenty of ways of getting that, as Mike notes, and imho he should be offering one himself (I do, myself). I did a rip for all the analysts, from their RSS feeds, just to give them an idea of what their site would look like if they cared about mobile users. I regret doing this because it distracted them from the real story…
The innovation here are the NY Times and BBC “rivers” of news, because they deliver the news flows of these services in the most convenient form for mobile users, the entire flow, reverse chronologic order, with summaries linked to print-friendly versions.
The BBC does offer something approaching this format, organized by category, the Times does not. You have to use it on a mobile device to read news to understand why it works.
Here’s a guy who explains it better than I can.
http://www.smst...winer_fixe.html
There were a bunch of insightful blog posts written by others around the time this stuff was announced, you can find them linked to here.
http://www.scri...When:10:09:23PM
If you all have any questions, I’ll try to answer them.
I agree with Chris about the BBC site. Not only do they have a text only version, but they’ve had an excellent mobile site on the go for years. In the UK I only have four bookmarks on my mobile, two of which are BBC news and BBC mobile.
I have no idea why anyone would need a rival service?!?
fwiw, here’s bbcriver.com in Bitty Browser and here’s BBC’s mobile site in Bitty…
-Scott
Thanks for the mention, Michael. It always makes me happy to see
conversations happening about the mobile web!BTW–We’re really sensitive to publishers’ revenue
opportunities using services like Skweezer that, for all intents and
purposes, make it easiest for the end-user. That’s why we developed
Advertizer™, our converged advertising program. Basically, a publisher can integrate our ad feed (XML, RSS, HTML, etc)
with both their desktop AND mobile traffic, and rev share 50/50. To
date, not even Google provides such a program, and we are already
working with a number of bloggers who’ve plugged our feed directly into their link lists via ATOM or RSS.
There are others in the mobile space that are developing interesting websites. One company up in Vancouver called RISKebiz at http://www.riskebiz.com is gearing up for the .MOBI push (in case anyone is looking for a good developer in this space).
What !? No advertising? This is America for god’s sake!
I personally think data on mobile may never work but the only chance it’s got is if it is completely optimized for slow connections, lousy UIs and tiny screens. Taking existing web pages and re-purposing for mobile is a losing proposition.
Use your phone to surf to google.com – they recognize it as a mobile device. Search google from there – you will get the full google result set (not just wap results), but when you click a result, google runs it through a proxy and changes the site on the fly to a mobile friendly version. Any site, any time.
I’m surprised we aren’t just seeing more like Google’s mobile gmail (m.gmail.com), adopt m instead of www for mobile versions of web sites and publish mobile-friendly site designs. For the news stuff, they still aren’t as good as offline sync sites like AvantGo from a usability/readability perspective.
The problem w/ dave’s approach is that HE decided what to include or not… and that is not good. The right solution will leave that decision to the website publisher. For example, leaving out the site ads mean removing one of the site’s potential revuene streams…
ceo
Enrique, those were just demos to help me find out which of the analysts were interested in mobile apps. That’s not “Dave’s approach.” Oy.
Surprised nobody mentioned plugins like Alex Kings WP mobile edition. Available http://www.alex...ware/wordpress/ for those interested.
Its interesting that after all the rah rah on 3G, WAP etc etc, many of the major data applications still seem to be either text based (sms, email) or converting multimedia web content into a more text based service as suggested here (and elsewhere)…the BBC didn’t do all this by accident or on a whim. Why?
I think that the answer is 2 – fold:
Firstly, a mobile is still pretty lousy to use for any protracted form of interaction apart from voice calls (try and read a document on a mobile for an exercise in frustration….), navigation is far harder so content has to be served up in a very easy to use way. Mobile co’s don’t help by traying to pass everything through their own portals.
Secondly in many countries the economics of data download is still unappealing – £1.00 for the song, £ 4.00 for the data used, the sticker shock is all yours. Imagine a world where 15 minutes of Youtube is the cost of a dinner for 2 in a good restaurant.
Point I’m making is that all this is a workaround for the intrinsic limitations of the mobile phone model as it is today.
(By the way, about 8 years ago I did a piece of work that suggested, by assuming Moore’s law etc, that by c 2006 we could have a wireless laptop that was also a phone, music player, movie player about the size of a Nintendo DS for $250…and damn I want one still !)
I second the wp-mobile plugin. Any blog running on WordPress can have a mobile version in minutes by uploading and activating this great plugin by Alex King.
Normally I try not to plug my site but i’ve seen other sites plugged and it goes along with the topic so here goes…
Try Wampad at http://wampad.com. Great site built for mobile browsers, it’s been called a Search Based Mobile Portal. I’ve had the ability to view rss feeds for a little while now, but recently I’ve been working to make them easier to bookmark. Try http://wampad.c.../rss/techcrunch. I’m still working on navigation and opml support but so far http://wampad.c.../rss/Feedburner Name] works great. You can also go to http://wampad.com and select rss from the drop down.
Its been done before by other companies on a much better scale.
I find it amusing how it spreads like fire amongst the blogging set when somebody like Winer creates a simple news reader.
I use Opera Mini, it does a good job.