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Delicious.com Goes Mobile

Published

on December 10, 2008

. 2 Comments

Yahoo owned social bookmarking site delicious.com launched a mobile web version yesterday. It's at m.delicious.com. The mobile site is a pretty basic read-only affair, it doesn't even seem possible to add a bookmark using the mobile version. What mobile Delicious does provide is a low bandwidth view of your bookmarks, inbox, tags, subscriptions, network and the top 10 URLs as defined by "Delicious Popular". You can browse your bookmarks by tag and search for a tag. The site works well for what seems to be Its main purpose; using your delicious bookmarks on a mobile phone.

The target of Delicious mobile is clearly the low end embedded browsers found on most feature phones. Bookmarks are paginated, 10 to a page and the only image is a tiny Delicious logo. Page weight including the image and CSS averages a reasonably petite 11 KB, of which 4 KB is a rather bloated looking style sheet.

I don't really see myself using this site much, at least not until it includes an add bookmark form that can be automated with a bookmarklet. I'm already a big Delicious user with over 3000 bookmarks. I 've been using it for years with Opera Mini. In fact most of my bookmarks were posted from Mini using a bookmarklet. The full version of Delicious works very well in Opera Mini, UCWEB and S60WebKit. I just hope Yahoo doesn't start forcing mobile users to the mobile version of Delicious like they have with the Yahoo home page and Y!Mail. Currently even with Opera Mini, S60WebKit and UCWEB I'm redirected to the mobile versions of most Yahoo web properties with no obvious way to get to the full sites. I'm all for sites offering mobile versions and even redirecting mobile browsers to them, but there needs to be an easy way for mobile visitors to get to the full sites too. Source: Delicious Blog via Mashable.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Technology/Mobile/BookMarking

Ratings: Content: Usability:

Mobile Link: m.delicious.com

Google's Mobile Tips

Published

Dennis Bournique

on December 8, 2008

in Google

. 0 Comments

Google Mobile Tips Google has put up a web site "Mobile Countdown to the New Year", which posts a new mobile tip every day through January 1st. The site is available in a full web version (google.com/mobile/tips) and also as a mobile website at google.com/mobile/m/tips/countdown.

The tips demonstrate clever things that you can do with Google's mobile services. There have been six tips posted so far and all have involved Google's mobile search, which is a good place to start. Search on mobile uses the same powerful, but at times complex query language, as its full-web brother making it fertile ground for tip writers.

Still I'm hoping Google will get into other areas of Google Mobile cleverness like a look at ways you can sync your phone with Google Contacts and Calendar using third party tools. Or a piece on creating a search feed in Google News and then following it in the mobile version of Reader.

Speaking of Reader, I'm a little disappointed that the "Mobile Countdown" doen't have an Atom or RSS feed. I'd much rather follow these tips in my mobile feed reader than have to remmber to go back to the site daily for updates. Source: Google Mobile Blog

Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Technology/Mobile/MobileTech

Ratings: Content: Usability:

Mobile Link: google.com/mobile/m/tips/countdown

MySpace Mobile Adds Video

Published

Dennis Bournique

on December 3, 2008

in Video

. 0 Comments

I just saw this on VentureBeat. MySpace has added video to their mobile site, m.myspace.com. Thanks to MySpace's original association with bands and music, it has tens of thousands of videos, especially music videos. It makes sense to make them available on mobile.

I took a look at the mobile video offering and it is live and it works but it's very limiting and not particularly user friendly.

To watch MySpace videos on your phone you have to jump through a number of hoops:

First you have to have a "compatible" phone. I couldn't find a list of what MySpace considers compatible so I used Firefox's User Agent Switcher to impersonate a number of phones. I confirmed that MySpace will let you watch videos on the Nokia N95 and N80, LG Voyager, Motorola RAZR2 V9, Samsung Instinct and Blackjack II. I'm sure there are other supported phones but among the dozen or so User Agents I tried those were the only ones that MySpace enabled the video link for. Notable video capable phones that MySpace doesn't currently support include the Nokia N73, AT&T Tilt, Motorola Z8, Sony Ericsson Z750a, the original BlackJack, iPhone and T-Mobile G1!

You have to have to be logged into MySpace mobile to watch videos. This is one of my pet peeves about MySpace mobile, you have to login to do anything. The full version of MySpace is very open and has many areas that are fully searchable and usable without logging in, including almost all the music videos. Logging in on a mobile phone is a pain especially with MySpace which uses (hard to triple tap) email addresses as IDs.

You can only watch videos that you have previously uploaded to MySpace or have flagged as favorites in the full-web version of the site. This combined with the login requirement kills discoverability. Google search returns links to MySpace videos but you can't view them on mobile, even if you are logged in, because you never added them to your favorites. I bet MySpace will lose millions of potential mobile users by these stupid restrictions on mobile versions of content that is wide open on the full web site.

Perhaps I'm being too harsh with MySpace mobile video, after all it is a Beta. I'm sure more phones will be flagged as compatible soon and sharing videos on MySpace will become popular with YouTube members. But MySpace is in decline as a social network. They need to reinvent themselves and the MySpace video catalog gives them a great opportunity to do that both on the web and with mobile.

If MySpace really wants to succeed in mobile video they need to look at what YouTube has done. I haven't seen any numbers on mobile video market share but my gut feeling is that YouTube is the leading mobile video site by a wide margin. YouTube is popular because of brand name recognition plus discovery and interoperability. Every video on the full YouTube site can also be viewed with any any video capable phone. Even better, the mobile and PC versions of YouTube videos can be accessed from a common URL, so every video linked in a blog post, on Twitter or found by a search engine is instantly available on mobile phones.

MySpace has great name recognition and I bet it could quickly become one of the leading mobile video destinations if MySpace followed YouTube's example and opened up mobile videos to all phones and users and also automatically served mobile formatted videos to mobile users who followed a link to the full version of a MySpace video.

Mobile Web Bargain Hunting

Published

Dennis Bournique

on November 30, 2008

in Site Reviews

. 1 Comment

How's your holiday shopping going? Spending more than you like? Here are a couple of mobile web sites to help you find the best deals.

Cheapen Gadget Mobile Homepage CheapenGadget (cheapengadget.com) is a new site from MechaWorks, publisher of PhoneNews.com. It's a blog style "Deal" site that's updated several times a day with the best deals on consumer electronics, computers, mobile phones and accessories both on the web and in stores.

Christopher Price and his team at MechaWorks did a great job of leaking the Black Friday ads of the major retailers days and even weeks ahead of time, now they are doing the same thing for CyberMonday which is tomorrow.

The mobile version of CheapenGadget uses the same template as PhoneNews. It does a decent job of making the site easier to use with most phone browsers. The front page has summaries of the last 20 posts, a search box and a list of categories. It's 30 KB of text, which is too large to load on some feature phones and takes a lot of scrolling to get to the bottom. Cutting the number of posts per page in half would make the site easier to use and compatible with more phones. Individual posts are smaller but watch out for the links to the source of each deal. They go directly to sites like BestBuy.com, most of which are not mobile friendly.

Ratings: Content: Usability:

Mobile Link: cheapengadget.com

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GottaDeal.mobi Homepage GottaDeal (gottadeal.mobi) is the new mobile edition of GottaDeal.com, a five year old online deal and coupon site. It's similar in concept to CheapenGadget but covers deals on pretty much anything rather than focusing on electronics and gadgets. The mobile version has three tabs:

Deals, which has headline links to the most recent deals posted on the full site, 20 to a page. The links lead to a mobile formatted detail page describing the deal. Although there are the same number of deals per page as CheapenGadget, the listings are just links and the total page weight is a mobile friendly 9 KB. Like, Cheapengadget, links to source of each deal tend to point to non mobile pages.

Coupons, a huge single page list of over 100 coupons offering discounts on online merchandise.

Forum which links to GottaDeal's very active (over a million posts) vBulletin user forum where members discuss the merits of deals, post tips on using products and suggest alternative sources for bargains.

GottaDeal.com is a useful site, but the mobile edition is less so. It could be much better with a few simple changes:

The Coupons page is huge, 118 KB. You will need a full-web or smartphone browser to even open it. It needs to be paginated like the Deals page.

Gottadeal.com on the full web has topic areas like Shoes, Jewelry and Cell phones plus a search box to help you find what you are looking for. The .mobi has none of these, it's just a list of deals and coupons sorted by date added. It's fun to browse for a few minutes but good luck finding anything specific. Navigational aids like search and categories are even more important on the mobile web because scrolling and browsing much slower on a phone than a PC.

The forum works pretty well in mobile format although some pages are a little on the large side. A bigger issue is that once you drill down into the discussions there is no way to get back to the deals and coupons pages except by pressing "Back" multiple times. The forum pages need links to the other parts of the site for easy navigation.

Source Mobility.mobi

Ratings: Content: Usability:

Mobile Link: gotadeal.mobi

For more sites like these visit the Shopping Category of the WapReview Mobile Web Directory which has 27 more mobile shopping sites including Amazon, Ebay, PriceGrabber, Yahoo Shopping and Overstock.com.