REVIEW: Viigo simplifies mobile RSS

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Yay or Nay. Every week we’ll review a new wireless application or service from the user’s point of view, with the goal of highlighting what works and what doesn’t. If you wish to submit your application or service for review, please contact us at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.
Application: Viigo
Running on: BlackBerry Pearl 8130 on Verizon Wireless’s EV-DO network
Yay: Thousands of RSS feeds delivered through a lightweight, highly customizable application. Oh yeah, and it’s free.
Nay: The app stresses content over aesthetics, so some of the screens are a little less than beautiful. Also, is it possible to have too many channels of RSS content?
We say: Viigo is ideal for those willing to invest a little time in tailoring a mobile RSS offering to suit their needs. And it’s sophisticated enough that the more time you spend with it, the more you’ll get out of it.
Review: Creating a great application for mobile news feeds isn’t easy, apparently. It seems the space is littered with services that offer too little content, are too difficult to navigate, or overload the handset with too much data.
Viigo effectively addresses each of these issues – and then some. The app is available for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile-enabled devices, and is a breeze to install either via a text link or by directing a mobile browser to the company’s download site.
The application’s default home screen can be a little overwhelming. Users are presented with roughly 20 channels of content including several news options from Reuters, a couple of tech blogs and PopSugar, and a celebrity-worship offering (George Clooney bikes around Lake Como!). Other interesting options include “Viigo recommends” and local traffic – which proved an especially practical feature.
The home screen indicates how many stories are available from each channel, and clicking on a channel’s headlines showcases Viigo’s real strength: Because the app loads an impressive amount of content from the start, drilling down into a channel typically takes less than a second, and retrieving the first graph or so of each story takes about as much time.
Accessing the full story (which requires the phone’s browser) presents a host of options including sending the piece via e-mail, posting to Del.icio.us or saving. Users can add feeds from a host of options or can type in URLs for more obscure sources, and can add content from aggregators such as Google Reader or My Yahoo, thereby eliminating the need to add a single channel at a time. Subscribers can determine the number of stories cached on the device for each channel (lest they get overwhelmed by sources that update hundreds of times a day).
One other thing struck us about Viigo: While the app is ad-supported (the company last year opted to stop charging for the offering), the few ads we saw (from American Express, most notably) were so unobtrusive as to sometimes get overlooked. And it appears most of the content channels offer no marketing messages at all.
That will likely need to change, of course, as the company moves from simply trying to drive traffic to actually monetizing its users more effectively. But that’s OK by us. We’d happily tolerate more pitches to keep using Viigo.