I want to be able to be able to read RSS feeds on my phone. Feeds are perfect mobile content - mostly text, all meat, none of the stuff like sidebars, headers, frames, navigation bars and popups that make most websites unusable on a phone.
There are a number of excellent web based RSS aggregators but I've been having a hard time finding a WAP based one that I want to use regularly. The usability just isn't there for one reason or another. I've found three readers that I have bookmarked on my phones and do use - but they all have nagging flaws that keep me searching for that perfect reader.
My vision of a perfect mobile RSS aggregator is something that works like Bloglines on the desktop.
- When I enter the reader I should see a list of the names of my subscribed feeds and an indication if the feed has any unread items.
- When I click on a feed, all I want to see is a list of just the titles of the entries in that feed. No descriptions - they take up to much screen real estate on a phone.
- When I click on an article title, I should get the full content of that entry broken into pages that are small enough for my phone to handle. Large images should be filtered out or resized to fit my screen and/or I should be able to turn images off.
- There should be a couple of links at the top and bottom of each screen that take me back to the entry list and feed list.
OK, but you say, Bloglines has a mobile version and then there's Skweezer, Phonifier, MobileLeap, Winksite, RSS2WAP, RSShome, Bloggo and Feedalot. Surely one these eight must do what you want!
Believe me, I've tried them all and all but three of them utterly fail meet my basic criteria. Even the three that I do use have annoying flaws that limit the amount that I want to use them.
By the way, if you wrote, funded or otherwise have a personal interest in one of these sites, I'm not trying to be mean. I really, really do appreciate the efforts of everyone working on mobile browsing applications. It's a difficult and so far mostly unrewarding medium for content providers. It WILL get better, I really believe that mobile is the future. But my role on this site is that of a opinionated critic pointing out what I think is good in mobile browsing - but also what needs improvement.
So what's wrong with mobile web based RSS aggregators There are two big sins and most of these sites are guilty of one or both.
- Trying to show too much information especially on the index page. By index page, I mean the list of items for an individual feed. To me, a mainstream phone has a 128x160 pixel screen. Sure, smartphones have at least 176x208 and feature phones like the RAZR are starting to use that size as well. But most Nokias have 128x128 screens and the entry level Nokias are only 96x65. If you want your site to have mass appeal you have to aim at the mass market devices. There's an example in the first image, this is Phonifier displaying the index page for this blog's feed. Compare that with the second image from Winksite, showing an index that works on small screens. Instead showing of a simple list of the titles of the feed's entries one per line, Phonifier includes the entry's description (a field in the feed that defaults to the first 270 characters of the item's text). Except that 270 characters fills three full screens on my phone. So if I want to see the title of the second entry I have to scroll down 3 screens. MobileLeap and Yahoo do the same thing. Skweezer and Bloglines are even worse, they dispense with an index page altogether and dump you into the full text of all the current entries one after another as one giant page (Skweezer does at least break the giant page up so it will load on limited memory phones). To get to the third entry I would have to scroll through the full text of the first entry. That's 15 screenfulls on a 128x160 phone. Thats OK if you just sequentially read though every post in every feed you subscribe to, but I read far too many feeds for that. I want to be able too scan the entry titles and read the ones that sound interesting and then maybe go back to the titles and read a couple more entries that sound interesting. These aggregators probably work pretty well on something like a PDA, Danger Hiptop/Sidekick or Nokia 9300 with a large screen and dedicated page-down keys. If that's the target device for some of these sites, fine. But those aren't the mainstream phones that I'm most interested in.As an aside, why don't most mobile browsers even have a page down key? I have four browsers on my S60 phone (Nokia's built in "Services" browser, Netfront, Opera and Doris) and all of then require me to push the D-pad down-key anywhere from 3 to 8 times to do a page down. OpenWave got it right back in their 4.0 browser of several years ago, holding down the down key for abut a second does a page down.
- Showing too little of the item's content. Almost all the feeds I read are full feeds - that is the entire blog item is in the feed. Many of these readers don't show you the full item content - ever. Yahoo, RSShome and RSS2WAP are like that. They show only the description or maybe a little more and then don't even provide a way to go to the host blog to read the item. What good is a reader that gives me a taste of the item and doesn't let me read it? MobileLeap and Phonifier are a little better, they link to a transcoded version of the item on the host web site. Thanks to the transcoding this is generally readable on the phone. But why a transcoded web page when the full plain text of the item is available in the feed - not only is this a waste of server resources but even after transcoding there's a lot of web page "furniture" like menus that get in the way of reading the item. These two readers are also guilty of sin number one - making the feed index almost unusable by including the description.
So what are the three readers that I find at least usable? They are Winksite,
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posted by Dennis Bournique
November 16, 2005 @ 9:46 pm
7 View Comments
