RSS: Made simple for mobile: Once the choice of smartphone users, mobile RSS feeds now target mainstream users

ONCE THE DOMAIN OF EARLY ADOPTERS on high-tech smartphones, mobile RSS is quietly moving into the mainstream.
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, first came to the Internet in 1999, and the format has become a must-have for savvy Web users looking to keep tabs on their favorite sites. RSS readers serve as a kind of content aggregator for the predetermined sites, allowing users to view updates from predetermined sites on a single page and giving them the option to drill down for more information.
And RSS is nothing new to mobile.
Google Inc. two years ago brought its first mobile RSS reader to market with its “mobile personalized homepage” – essentially a stripped-down version of its iGoogle offering, coupling RSS feeds with weather information and other personalized content. A handful of startups followed, adding RSS capabilities to their transcoding services or offering stand-alone mobile RSS readers, as traditional RSS companies worked to expand their offerings to wireless users.
Most of the early offerings were targeted at smartphone users, however, and many were simply customizable Web pages optimized for mobile phones. But developers are beginning to target feature-phone users with downloadable applications that funnel the ocean of Internet content onto the handset.
Yahoo Inc. has made RSS a key component of onePlace, a tool designed as a single location for users to manage content and messaging across the wireless Web. Other Internet giants continue to mobilize their RSS services – although perhaps not as conspicuously as Yahoo – as they expand beyond the PC onto mobile phones.
“We can see that this space is becoming very, very attractive,” said Dusyant Patel, CEO of the Swedish startup Mobispine. “Two years ago you had one or two people in this space. Today you’re looking at 13, 14 people in the same space, including Google, Microsoft.”
Mobispine offers a free, Java-based download that delivers mobile RSS access to news feeds from 250,000 sources. Users are encouraged to add feeds to the database for others subscribers to access, and the client learns user preferences and can recommend news sites and blogs.
Simple solutions wanted
RSS seems a natural fit for wireless, of course, given the headache-inducing experience that is the mobile Web. News feeds can eliminate the painful process of triple-tapping to enter a URL, and can give users a top-down view of their favorite sites to see which ones they’d like to visit – and which they can ignore.
“It’s an easy way to discover and navigate; it’s about usability,” said Ulf Wretling, head of developer program and communications for Sony Ericsson, which is touting Mobispine’s solution. “You probably could get most or all of (that content) by going directly to different sources, but it’s very tricky to do that.”
While Sony Ericsson is hoping to leverage its ties with Mobispine and others to sell handsets – the manufacturer last week made Mobispine’s reader available through its portal – a handful of carriers have signed on, seeing the technology as a potential way to spur adoption of the mobile Web.
But the real money for those trying to leverage RSS as a tool for mobile may lie in advertising – which, for developers such as Mobispine and Yahoo, means drawing traffic is a must. Patel said last July that Mobispine was aiming to attract 10 million subscribers within the next year, a goal he concedes the company has yet to reach. The company seems to be gaining a foothold in emerging markets such as Eastern Europe, China and South America, however, and is targeting users in such areas with local content that can’t be found on CNN.com or other international sources.
But Patel’s long-term sites are set on Western Europe and North America, where the major advertisers live. Mobispine recently began delivering targeted ads between stories, allowing users to click for more information. While still in its early days, the foray into the realm of wireless ads has been encouraging, he reported.
“We actually just started this business model about three weeks ago,” Patel said reservedly. “Now we’re integrating our engines with Google, with ScreenTonic, and were getting a response – to be cautiously quoted – that’s very, very good.”