Mobile Feed Reading
Barb has a post on the Social Software weblog asking about mobile feed reading. First let me chime in and say that normally I use Bloglines on both my Nokia and Palm devices, and Bloglines is my primary reader on my desktop too. But I was very happy to see that she mentioned something that I haven’t tried out yet: Litefeeds. Cool! So I got to thinking, what free RSS aggies for mobile phones are there? I know of these ones right off the top of my head:
- Bloglines - the big kid on the block.
- BuddyBuzz - we saw this over at Mobile Monday on demo night, but I had already used it before - a newsreader based on rapid serial presentation.
- WinkSite - personal WAP site creator that lets you syndicate feeds you can then read on a mobile.
- FeedBurner - haven’t used this in a while, anyone had good experiences with it?
- MyYahoo Mobile - allows you to view your subscribed feeds from a mobile device, though some say this isn’t really an aggie cause it doesn’t mark items read (which would apply to WinkSite also to be fair).
So what else is there out there? What services should folks be looking at? What software is there for the snatching? I’m certainly going to give Litefeeds a try, I would love to have some others to play with.
August 31st, 2005 at 2:53 pm
[...] Mike lists a number of options for mobile RSS reading. I’m also a user of Bloglines on both my Mac at home, my PC at work and my Nokia 6630: The main benefit is keeping the read / unread status in one place. The biggest problem I have is when pages fail to load on the phone or when I want to visit the full post with a fully fledged browser. The save functionality on the mobile client doesn’t work in the same way as the full version [...]
September 1st, 2005 at 4:14 am
Hi
We offered a stripped down version of Free News on our blog at MobHappy http://mobhappy.typepad.com/russell_buckleys_mobhappy/2005/08/free_mobile_rss.html.
It’s free and comes pre-loaded with 15 mobile-oriented links.
September 6th, 2005 at 3:44 pm
Hi Mike -
While not free, many people have found FreeNews to be well worth the $20 a year. It’s extremely different than the products you’ve listed above in that it is not WAP based and downloads all your subscribed feeds over the air onto your phone, letting you read them on a subway, airplane etc. There is also a built-in text only browser for reading full stories on your phone without all the formatting and images, solving the big problem identified by the first comment above.
More info and a trial version are available at http://www.freerangeinc.com
FreeNews is the basis for the Mobhappy newsreader the Russell mentions above.
September 7th, 2005 at 3:03 am
Mobile Feed Reading
Great list from MoMo Mike on RSS aggregators for mobile (also follow the link to Barb’s post). The catch with reading RSS on a mobile is that photos come across as full sized, which suck if you are reading Flickr.
September 8th, 2005 at 3:24 am
NewsBreak is pretty good for MS mobile- works fine on my MDA compact. There’s a free version which gives you five feeds, full version is $30, I think.