RSS Feeds on Mobile Phones

February 8, 2006

Sure you got your Blackberry/Crackberry which gives you your "fix" of email, and sure you got your mobile phone for voice access and Web surfing, but the truly wired folks want not only email & web access but also access to their favorite RSS feeds. Yep, I for one need my fixin' of my favorite VoIP blog feeds, gadget blog feeds, general technology news feeds, and a dab of some political blog feeds, which I access using a Windows-based RSS reader application.

But what to do when you're not on your own PC? Sure you could use Bloglines.com or some other web-based RSS reader, but what if you don't have access to ANY PC? What if all you have is your mobile phone? Bloglines.com is great but it wasn't designed for the small display of a mobile phone nor does it compress images to save bandwidth or resize them to fit a mobile phone's smaller display.

Well, the solution to my daily RSS fix just might be netomat, a service launched on January 10th that helps optimize RSS feeds for your mobile phone device. First, netomat does resize images to the right size for mobile phones. It searches a feed for the image tag and resizes for the phone. This works pretty well with services such as Flickr and other photo sharing portals. I actually learned about netomat when they invited me to share my blog's RSS feed with netomat users, which enticed me to check them out.

I asked netomat if netomat was a "RSS reader for mobiles" was an accurate description and netomat told me that there is more to it than that. netomat allows users to create groups called hubs in which they can share news, pictures and comments. A netomat hub seamlessly integrates multiple services for real-time group communication. This includes picture and text messaging with presence, trusted social networking, RSS syndication, digital photo storage and update alerts.

Members can set up groups, called hubs, devoted to any topic from their mobile phones and PCs. They can then invite friends and friends of friends to their hubs and begin sharing and messaging instantly - adding camera phone photos, digital camera photos and as much text as they want.

In addition to sharing their own content, members can easily "drag and drop" RSS feeds to a hub and receive content updates containing images and text on their mobile phones and PCs. Users can also invite friends to that hub and chat about the news feed.