News Feeds Provide Mobile Content For Now
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Hot Mobile News
Sybase iAnywhere has unveiled AvantGo mobile Internet service, featuring a wireless experience that enables users to have always-available access to their favorite Web content, automatically synchronized to their mobile device. The beta software for BlackBerry handsets gives users the opportunity to take the service for a test-drive.
Mobile Voter is a non-profit non-partisan organization dedicated to using mobile technology (i.e., cell phones) to engage youth civically. Mobile Voter’s current project is called TxtVoter, which uses text messaging to facilitate voter registration. Text messaging has the potential to connect with youth in new, exciting, and effective ways. Over 80% of young people own a mobile phone and more than 65% regularly send text messages.
Yahoo and Microsoft will combine their formerly exclusive instant messaging services and allow members to mingle. The union of Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger systems will create the world’s largest combined IM network with nearly 350 million users.
Powerful players are pushing to ensure that the Mobile Internet has as much content as the regular Internet world. One objective is that any web page designed for a desktop PC should also be viewable on mobile devices too. This has been dubbed as the One Web Principle. Unfortunately with so much potential ad revenue to be gained in the Mobile world, different players are in general doing their own thing. Developing and getting industry consensus on Mobile Standards is proving to be a veritable Tower of Babel. Given this, it is not surprising that Desktop PC viewable websites are rarely suitable for Mobile devices.
Perhaps another development will make suitable content more available for mobile devices. There are a number of reasons why more and more websites will have associated RSS News Feeds. At the end of September, the Google Reader was upgraded with a much more user-friendly way of monitoring news feeds. There have been a number of reasonably satisfactory news feed aggregators before this, but the extra push from Google should make this way of keeping on top of the news more popular.
An even stronger push will come when Version 7 of Internet Explorer is finally released before the end of the year. It is now available in Pre-release version. This reveals a browser with much more visibility given to news feeds. Indeed there is even a gentle Microsoft swish whenever you visit a web page that has an associated news feed. Even back in early 2005, Robert Scoble, then of Microsoft, was encouraging all marketers to add RSS news feeds. Surely now we’ll be seeing many more websites with news feed.
News feeds with summary text content and few images are ideal for display on mobile device. So this may be the way we see much more mobile content. Just display the RSS news feed. You do already have mobile versions of the news feed aggregators you can use. There are mobile versions of FeedBurner, FreeNews, Bloglines and now Google Reader.
There are also some other new services that include news feeds. One such is Hubdog, which offers thousands of blogs, news, music and video podcasts fit for mobile.
Eventually perhaps we’ll have most full web pages with associated content suitably arranged for our mobile devices. Till then, news feeds can certainly fill the gap.
Tags: Mobile, RSS news feed
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