Content Usability

Mowser.com was created by Russell Beattie in 2007 and was aquired by dotMobi in 2008. It combined search, a transcoder. a directory of over 2000 feeds, chat room, forum and a mobile site directory. The service has been looking neglected lately, the search engine no longer seems to return results for anything and broken links and server side errors abound.

Back in the day, it was an impressive mobile portal. The transcoder  worked well. The search results were high quality, The search combined Microsoft Live results with small 150 px wide images (from Snap.com) of each search hit long before Google and Bing started including thumbnails with search results. The mobile directory was very complete and was supplemented by the huge categorized feed directory which essentially creates another 2000 mobile sites web sites.

Mobile transcoders were not popular with webmasters and content providers but Mowser is attempted to change that by giving site owners unprecedented control over how their transcoded site looks in Mouser. By adding a few meta tags  to your site you could:

• Have Mowser insert YOUR AdMob mobile ads (with your AdMob site ID) into transcoded sites so you can get some revenue from the transcoded pages.

• Control page appearance by adding a media="handheld" stylesheet which Mowser will use when transcoding your site.

• Have Google and possibly other search engines direct mobile users to the Mowser transcooded version of your site.

Mowser transcoder detected a true mobile site it shows it unaltered - something I that  Google and Skweezer's transcoders didn't do at that time.

I was very impressed with Mowser five years ago. But the time for transcoders has passed and it looks like dotMobi is letting Mowser quietly fade into non-functionality and obscurity.