Monday, May 15, 2006

OK, they started this back in April, but I just noticed this and it's pretty cool. USA Today has launched a series of RSS feeds that are optimized to deliver news content to cell phones and other mobile devices. You can find them at the bottom of the USA Today feeds page.

These mobile feeds are technically still in beta, says Matt Jones, director of mobile products for USAToday.com. "We are most likely committed to offering these feeds, but with any beta release, we're testing the amount of interest and the end-to-end reliability of the product." Currently the feeds contain no advertising, although that's a possibility for the future, Jones said.

On May 2, famed PR blogger Steve Rubel wrote, "What's nice about these feeds is that they link to the mobile-friendly news stories like this one, rather than graphics-laden pages. I wish these were full-text feeds instead. The paper is not running any ads on the mobile pages so why do they care about the page views?"

Of course, since 2005 Yahoo! Mobile has allowed users to read on a cell phone any feeds (including those from news organizations) they've subscribed to via their My Yahoo! pages. (More on this.) Bloglines Mobile offers a similar service.

Another approach is offered by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's P-I Anywhere mobile service -- a web site optimized for wireless browsing. And then, of course, there's AvantGo's mobile browsing services (used by the LA Times and other news organizations). That's fine -- but personally I think sites that deliver content via mobile-optimized feeds are more user-friendly and efficient. I'd rather download the data and read it offline. And I've generally found Web browsing by cell phone to be a pretty painful experience.

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