With R|Mail serving me my RSS feeds, I now get my headlines delivered fresh from the source, moments after they’ve been released. Then it came to me. With the forwarding of e-mails to my mobile, I’d also get those headlines, thus the RSS feeds live on my cell. How very cool. I did some Googling about the matter and have found out not too many sites are familiar with this service, nor are there a lot of RSS-to-mobile generators to subscribe to.
Google, currently in the news with its release of the Accelerator Beta, has kind of missed the RSS train bigtime. That’s common knowledge.
Instead of putting energy in the Accelerator project – which doesn’t feel that Googly at all, as discussed by Nathan Weinberg on BNC – I think It’d be very cool if Google were to throw itself on the RSS matter.
With all the creative and programming power their team has, it should be a piece of cake for Google to catch up on Yahoo!’s MyYahoo Mobile.
The Yahoo Search Blog posted on March 10th :
“We’ve just launched a new addition to Yahoo! Mobile which allow you to read the RSS news feeds that you’ve subscribed to in your My Yahoo! page from your mobile phone’s minibrowser.
To see your My Yahoo! subscriptions, enter the above URL in your phone’s WAP 2.0 minibrowser and navigate down to the News link. From there click on My Headlines, log in with your Yahoo! ID and all the RSS headlines that you’ve added to your My Yahoo! page are listed, ready to be read on the go. Clicking on the individual feed links will let you read a summary of the stories (about 1024 characters, which is actually more than appears on the My Yahoo! Web version) and if you’ve got a phone which has a browser that supports full HTML web pages, each of the headlines will be live links to the original article. Simple and easy.”
Now that is a very cool option. But let’s say I wanted to customize my feeds and make it all more personal. Then what?
“For the mobile power users out there who want both more control over their feeds and longer summaries (or even full posts), we hear you. This launch is just the tip of the iceberg of what we’re planning. Our ultimate goal is to make keeping up your feeds on your mobile device as useful and as easy as it is on the desktop. We’re starting simple, but thinking big. (When it comes to mobile, there’s no other way to think!)”
I’m not saying Google isn’t in the mobile game at all. Far from.
They too have a very clever Mobile Search. Here’s some examples :
“Search the Web: At the grocery store and need to find the ingredients for chicken salad? Just query “chicken salad ingredients” on your cell phone’s mobile Web browser to search through more than 8 billion pages for the recipe that will wow your taste buds.
Search Images: Is that the Empire State building or the Chrysler building? Search more than a billion images and get the one you need on your phone with Google Image Search.”
That’s cool too. But those are not really things I personally want to do on my mobile phone. I want RSS. I want news and blog feeds while I’m on the train or waiting in the station. When I’m in class. If there’s no PC in the vicinity, I rely on my mobile to be in touch with the world, to stay up to date. This is a field where Google has left me standing, despite all other beautiful products.
Google’s Accelerator is ‘small potatoes‘ compared to what they’ve done already and what they could do in the future. If they wanted to. Well I think the ‘if they wanted to’ time should end. I’m willing to give credit to a lot of things in development, and I’ll test any Beta there is,
but I feel the ‘if they wanted to’ status has been going around a bit for too long. It’s not a decent marketing policy to ignore certain parts of technology (RSS in particular) and force the users that rely on your products (or on multiple products) to turn to your ‘competitors’ in business to help satisfying their needs.
Read about Google’s Web Accelerator on InsideGoogle
Check out Google Mobile
Read the entire post on Yahoo!’s Search Blog