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Finally launching: mobifeeds - get feeds anywhere!

MobifeedsMuch has been said about the whole Web 2.0 paradigm. Release early, release often, label it beta and go ahead without fears. Me, being a bit of a perfectionist, have found some problems implementing those guidelines.

The truth is that I have been working on a little service for over a year – on and off – which I have so cleverly named mobifeeds (I've never been the best at naming things). As you can probably hopefully tell from the name, it's a service that allows you to read any feed from a mobile device.

Why?

I don't expect people to use this service as their main source of news, but I do feel – and I've felt that need myself – to read some news/posts while going to work or waiting for the bus. This is an almost free way (depending on your operator gprs rates) to get access to all the news/blog posts you want, right in your mobile. If you have an RSS feed for the movies showing at particular theatre, it's a cheap way to get it anywhere you go. If you're a blog owner, use it to track comments in your blog. Actually, the options are endless, since everything available through RSS will be available to any phone with a browser.

That's why I made the website usable both on the desktop and on mobile devices, but I expect people to use the mobile only to read and the desktop to add content to the database.

Why "finally"?

Even though I've been using it myself for a couple of months now, I never felt it had matured enough for me to put it out there for everyone to see. That was until I started showing it to a couple of friends and noticed some interest in a service like this. I then started dedicating some of my free time to this project, grabbed the domain and implemented some features it had been lacking. For the record, I still think it needs major improving, but I'm going to try and take advantage of the feedback I get from this launch.

What does it do?

The point of the whole service is to allow any user to add feeds at their own taste and generate a friendly URL so that you can access it when you're on the run. It doesn't support personal aggregation – yet – but it's easy to bookmark the ones you are most interested in. Bear with me, it's an evolving project.

Here's a compiled list of features or jump right at it and see for yourself:

andr3.net's mobifeed
  • Support for RSS, ATOM and RDF formats.
  • Supports Auto-discovery
    just type in the url of the site, instead of the feed's address
  • OPML Import (by URL or file upload)
  • 3 different modes of reading
    Titles only, short summary, full description. Average pagesize below 5KB.
  • Outgoing links through iyhy.com and Google Mobile Proxy
  • External CSS file for your feeds
    more info. inspired by dunstan
  • Basic Search
  • Browse list of feeds

These are the basic set of features for now, but expect to see some updates in the future – namely tag support. Also, if you have some requests / suggestions, drop me a line.

How to use it

  1. Add a feed with a slug (one word describing the feed).
  2. type the URL in your mobile.
  3. bookmark it.
  4. et voilá!

Yes, it's that simple.

Feedback

As pretty much everything launching nowadays on the web – besides WeBreakStuff's GoPlan ; ) *respect* –, this service is still in Beta alpha. Meaning you will find some glitches in the service. When you do, I'd be most thankful if you could report it in the contact page. Specify what you were doing (if you were adding a feed, let me have the url of the feed) and what error message you got. Thank you in advance.
I am specially looking for some feedback from owners of mid-range mobile phones a.k.a. 2G phones. If you can provide me with some insights of the quality of service in those phones, that'd be great!

«Thank you»

I'd like to take a second to thank some people. Namely by brother, Bruno Luís for making the logo, João Craveiro and Cláudio Franco for helping with technical advice and usability tips. Also, karlus for some legal insights and everyone I nagged to visit the site and tell me what they thought of it. Thank you all.

Spread the word

Feel free to use the badges provided to link to your own mobifeed from your page. It will help your users to know they can read you wherever they are!


Also, since I haven't been the most active blogger, feel free to blog this. Thanks.

mobifeeds in action

Stay tuned

If you're interested, you can follow future developments at the mobifeeds — development weblog.

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