FeedM8
Rating: er RSS anyone?
by Rob Knight
Wattpad, previously mentioned on GoMo News for their Story Sharing Community launched a new service today called FeedM8 (Feed Mate), smooth eh..I wonder what marketing agency came up with that genius idea!!..anyway I digress….. FeedM8 enables mobile users to access content from feed enabled websites, from which I gather they mean RSS I presume. This they say, provides a handset specific version of the site requested.
From the Press Release:
"Anyone who has tried mobile browsing will tell you that most websites
are not mobile friendly or do not have mobile specific versions. Mobile
users are still having a hard time gleaning information from the
Internet," said Ivan Yuen, Co-founder of Wattpad. "FeedM8 is a simple
service that completely eliminates the need of mobile specific
websites. With FeedM8, mobile users can browse the websites they want,
while publishers add a new source of revenue."
They continue "FeedM8 is a revolutionary service that solves the above problem using a
new patent-pending technology. Mobile users can now go to fdm8.com on
their mobile phone and visit their favorite websites, even if it is not
mobile friendly…FeedM8 will automatically create a phone model specific version of the
selected site for display. The transformation takes into account
handset specific capabilities and dramatically reduces mobile network
bandwidth required to support rich Internet traffic. This delivers
optimal speed, presentation, usability and content quality across
mass-market handsets and high-tier handsets with full HTML browsers.
With FeedM8, the World Wide Web is finally mobilized."
We say:
Ok, patent pending, revolutionary? Having tested the system I fail to see, as yet, where it is any of those things. What I have seen is that it is a glorified RSS reader, which is fine but not much else; I mean it’s not even converting content on the fly like the Opera Server solution is it? Come on guys..tell us what your technology is doing, there’s nothing on your web site and from what I have seen very little handset specific tech is going on. Yes, you could tell the screen size of the device if the mobile browser is running Javascript but that’s not exactly patent pending is it.
I tested FeedM8’s feed of BBC news against the BBC mobile news portal on my Blackberry 8800 and the BBC’s was better laid out and just as quick..and it wasn’t just an RSS feed. What FeedM8 does do is insert an RSS type ad feed, which is totally unrelated to the content you are browsing. I’m left thinking there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors and not much else. RSStastic!
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