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. To send feeds to phones, there should be a resizing, otherwise the user is paying to view a huge image on a small screen. Also, some feeds, such as Typepad, are not mobile friendly and are huge chunks of data. one more example of how folks just don’t think about mobile, but of free broadband connections.

Futurice has addressed this somewhat by coming up with a atom-friendly photo feed format and accompanying app. Also, I heard that Litefeeds also optimizes feeds for mobile devices. But, the Litefeeds app doesn’t work on my phone, an N70, so I can’t verify that.

I just want a feed reader that works with a basic phone browser. Bloglines works with a browser, but does not optimize the images. Argh! WINKsite works with a normal browser, but I think it goes too far in optimizing for the phone. Can we find a middle ground? The mobile app is great to give a wonderful experience, but the service should be able to degrade gracefully to a mobile browser.

Link: 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: