YubNub is a web app that has been generating a lot of buzz ever since Jon Aquino created it a year ago to win a Ruby on Rails programming contest. If you haven’t heard of YubNub (Ewok for “hooray’, BTW) it’s a “command line for the web”. Just like the MS-DOS > prompt or a *nix shell, you type commands into YubNub and wonderful things happen – or not – if you mess up. As the web takes on more … Continue reading
I got an email from Shawn McCollum, the guy who created the WamPad site I blogged about a couple of weeks ago. Shawn’s made some nice updates to the site. To quote Shawn’s email: 1. Website Entry – I’ve updated it so you can access sites with or without transcoding . I was playing around with a bunch of different crazy ideas but at the very end I went with a simple approach. So it’s just a list of links … Continue reading
I got an email from a fellow named Shawn McCollum asking me to take a look at his new mobile site, Wampad.com. I believe that Shawn has actually created a new type of mobile site – a search based portal. The basic concept is that you enter a search phrase once and then use it to query a bunch of different sites. Wampad’s front page is simplicity itself. There’s just a drop down, a text box and a Go button. … Continue reading
Here’s a neat new site that I found mentioned at MobileRead. It’s called news4mobile – which is a sort of misleading name as it’s not really a news site. News4mobile is a mobile portal with a social ranking system that makes it sort of a combination of Digg and del.icio.us. Anyone can (after registering) add a link to a mobile site. That’s not especially new as there have been lots of sites like that and most of them quickly became … Continue reading
I just visited the MSN Mobile homepage and saw two new items in the menu, Windows Live Mail Beta and Windows Live Search Beta. I did a web search and it turns out that they aren’t really that new having been out for over a month, but they seem to have been more or less ignored so far. The Microsoft Live Mobile team has a blog (NOT Firefox friendly) called Mobile access everywhere! which seems to be the best source … Continue reading
In my last entry, I hinted that there is an another mobile search site that did an even better job of making “real” web sites usable on WAP browsers. That site is AOL’s mobile search portal. You use it just like Google’s mobile search and like desktop search engines by entering your search terms and then picking a site to browse from a list of sites that match your query. Like Goggle, but unlike all the other mobile search/transcoding sites … Continue reading
The Google Mobile site has been upgraded. Specifically the Web search for WAP2 phones. This lets you do a search of the web for regular desktop websites (there is also a Mobile Web search for finding WAP sites – which hasn’t been updated and works very well). The Web search function has been around for a while and has always allowed you to browse the sites it finds. What’s changed is that before the version of the web site sent … Continue reading
FAST MSearch is a WAP search engine that is not usually available on a public url. FAST prefers to sell their search technology to mobile carriers (I’m not sure which carriers). It is a shame that FAST is not more widely available as it is THE best WAP search engine I have seen. It seems to have a database of WAP sites that is more complete than even Google’s and doesn’t return the duplicate hits that plague Google’s mobile search. … Continue reading