The Ultimate Website Mobilizer Smackdown!

In the beginning, before PDA and phone became one, there was AvantGo. It made use of your desktop computer’s internet connection to suck down just enough web content for you to consume during your idle moments on the go until your next HotSync.

It was really no more than a daily (weekly?) digest of your favourite websites, but it was the best that could be done. Of course, on cell phones of the day there was this thing called WAP, but near as I can tell nobody ever used it much.

AvantGo and WAP are still around. But a PDA’s (relatively) large screen is still best-suited to a single column of text, and many screens on the latest crop of 3rd-generation mobile phones are much smaller than that!

You can cross your fingers that your favourite site will have its own mobile edition — but if it doesn’t, what then?

Enter what I call the website mobilizer — sure you can pave the way for early-onset arthritis by pinching and flicking your way around the full-sized web on your iPhone’s fancy screen, but I reckon that even iPhone users will quickly tire of long page loads when they can’t find a WiFi signal and are forced to use their carrier’s glacial 2G data connection…

Near as I can tell, website mobilizers come in two basic flavours, page-fetchers and RSS-grabbers.

Page-fetchers do exactly what you would expect them to — you input a website URL and get back the content, stripped of any unnecessary formatting (and often graphics). Example of page-fetchers include:

• FeedM8 — a two-pronged service, offering a portal for popular sites like our very own BlogTO in addition to “roll-your-own” URLs.
• This unnamed service from Google — with only one option, to block images or not.
  
• IYHY.com — “If you create a free account with us, it will save a link to every site that you visit through the IYHY.com homepage, so in the future you can just click on the sites you want to visit without having to type the urls.” — too bad the link to the signup page doesn’t work.
• Mowser — a site mobilizer and search engine, along with a directory of news, politics & tech.
  
• Skweezer (shown above) — popular with the BlackBerry crowd. Also gives you a directory of sites, plus the ability to save bookmarks if you sign up for an account.

I tested this very blog with each of these services, and the results were nearly identical. Mowser returned perhaps the best-looking mobilized page and Skweezer was kind enough to let me how many kilobytes of data had been stripped out, but ultimately the process of navigating to any of these sites and entering a URL by hand is a tedious affair at best.

RSS-grabbers have the ability to grab content from many disparate sources and present them in one unified block. The single best example of this is the mobile version of Bloglines. I deliberately use Bloglines instead of a desktop RSS reader so that my feeds are always updated wherever I go. And the best part is that rather than having to search somewhere for it most of what I want comes to me!

Bloglines is so good in fact that it’s earned the honour of homepage on my Nokia’s web browser. Its only drawback is that I can’t figure out how to strip out the images in my feeds, but I suppose that’s what these new cheap data plans are for…

We could really just stop here but there are a couple of other interesting RSS-grabbers you might want to know about. NewsGatorGo is definitely not one of them — why on Earth would anyone pay thirty bucks for what Bloglines gives you for free?!

Kaywa’s Feed2Mobile service will generate a QR Code which you can use in one of two ways:

1. You can use your phonecam and built-in decoding software to grab the URL straight from your desktop computer’s screen, or…
2. You can display the code on your very own page and have your readers do the same.

I opted for Winksite to generate the QR Code here at WordPress. The folks there go a step further than mobilizing a single page — sign up for an account with them like I did and you can get your very own micro-site, pulling in feeds from wherever you choose. Have a look at the screen grab above and you’ll quickly realize that you can now reap all the benefits of Facebook without even having to join!

Winksite is also doing its best to create a community of users around geographic locales (called “metros” for some reason) and tags. It’s a good idea but I’m not seeing any community love there as of yet… Maybe it’s my inflammatory remarks about the Grey Cup?

Hopefully all this will prove that the mobile web is still worth browsing even without a fancy big screen… So what are you waiting for? I need some Winksite friends, dagnabbit!