On the move

http://theinternetispeople.com/2006/08/30/on-the-move/

Om Malik and Michael Arrington are pondering Dave Winer’s move towards mobile-enabling the blogosphere. Specifically, his product OPML Editor will allow users to view content they’ve subscribed to on their mobile phone. This is definitely a useful feature; I certainly spend a fair amount of time viewing my Gmail on my phone (in lieu of a Blackberry or similar device), and the ability to subscribe to content and take it with you is brilliant. Similarly, Winer’s Yomoblog.com service for posting to weblogs by phone looks like it could be great.

Arrington also highlights Skweezer, a site that will take any other site and return it in a mobile-friendly format. This seems completely redundant to me given the existence of Opera Mini, an excellent browser that goes through Opera’s proxy server which automatically provides content-squeezing functionality. I now can’t do without it, and there aren’t any phone browsers – certainly not for my handset – that come close in terms of functionality. (To see if it meets your needs, there’s a Java-based demo here.)

Update: Of course, some sites prefer to do this kind of optimisation themselves on a per-platform basis: Yahoo! Go has just been released for Windows Mobile, for example.