The Ultimate Mobile Transcoder

A bunch of new mobile web related services have got me thinking about mobile transcoders and how web services can enhance the mobile experience. The new services are ShifD, Qpyn, Tapp.it and esyURL all of which combine a web to mobile transcoding proxy with some other service; content synchronization in the case of ShifD, URL shortening for the others.

Tinyurl.com's free URL shortening service has been around since 2002 but has recently gained new popularity thanks to Twitter and the 160 character limit of SMS. The problem comes when the recipient of a Twit on a dumb phone tries to open a URL, tiny or not. In many cases the link will open a full web site causing the browser to error out, lockup or display something unusable.

esyUrl.com, Qpyn.com and Tapp.it are tinyurl.com clones which optionally invoke a transcoder to mobilize their targets. All three services work more or less the same way. You go to a PC web site and enter a long url that you want shortened. So if you have a long url that want to share like this one to a New York Times story: www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/business/27leonhardt.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

You can use:

• Tapp.it where you specify if you want your short URL to point directly to a site or to a mobile transcoded version. That's OK if you're sending the link to a phone, which Tapp.it facilitates with a Send To Phone option, but not so good for sharing the link on Twitter where you have no idea what kind of browser will be used to open it. The Tappit short URL for the Times story is tapp.it/dpajpmpj
• esyURL which creates a single link that goes to a landing page where the user gets the choice of visiting the original link target or a mobile transcoded version. The Times URL becomes esyurl.com/5wr using esyURL.
• Qpyn goes a step further and uses browser detection to automatically invoke the transcoder only if a mobile browser is detected. The Qpyn shortened URL to the Times aricle is qpyn.com/go/?1ep27. Qpyn actually suggests that you use the shorthand notation "qpyn.com[1ep27]" or "Q[1ep27]" when sharing links rather than the full URL. I can't see anyone doing that unless Qpyn becomes as well known as Twitter itself. Who would have any idea that "Q[1ep27]" means "Go to qpyn.com (or qpyn.mobi) and enter 1ep27"? If I have to explain all that I'd rather just say "http://qpyn.com/go/?1ep27"

For their transcoder, Tapp.it and esyURL use Mowser, probably the best current transcoder. Qpyn uses a white label transcoder which seems pretty good too, at least it meets my basic test of transcoder quality - it splits long pages and resizes images.

ShifD, which was developed at a Yahoo Hack Day, by a couple of the New York Times' web developers, syncs notes, bookmarks and locations between all your PCs and phones. You key or paste text, addresses or URLs into a web, desktop, mobile web or SMS interface. ShifD stores your data on the web and makes it instantly and simultaneously available everywhere. Notes and addresses are just text and display as is on both web and mobile. The mobile version of Shifd opens URLs with Mowser. There's a lot more to the ShifD story which has it's been extensively covered on the web already. See: Engadget, Beet.TV, Russell Beattie

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posted by Dennis Bournique
February 26, 2008 @ 10:13 pm
7 View Comments