Really Simple Mobile Surfing

Came across this interesting news article:

http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101226

Talks about how RSS could revolutionize the content services on mobile phones..Some interesting things talked about in this article are:

One problem with the development of the mobile Internet has been an overdependence on technical jargon and terms that are meaningless to consumers. But RSS is so simple, so easily described or managed as "subscriptions" or "updates" or "news feeds", and so flexible, that it could become the standard for information delivery to mobile devices, and make the mobile Internet an integral part of people's lives, or at least much more integral than it is today.

The real breakthrough here would be to develop a mobile RSS reader designed for the non-technically inclined, then support it with a Web-based management tool so users could maintain their subscriptions and update their reader over the air. It could be branded by a carrier (or whoever, really), and made to fit in to their existing content portals, and the reader software could be given a simple UI based around subscriptions or some other easily digestible paradigm

MocoNews thinks AOL might be up to something like this, based on a job posting for a development position there in "Wireless RSS".

RSS makes a lot of sense for the mobile space. It lets content be preloaded, taking out the waiting time inherent in browsing on many of today's 2G networks. Content providers could throw nearly anything into an RSS feed, and users could have it stored locally on their handset. Not just news or blog updates, but things like movie listings or sports scores, and even group messaging. It's also great because as much as the content can be self-contained, it can also be a jumping-off point for a browsing session. Say a user opens up the movie listings, and finds something they want to see. They click a link in the showtime entry, and they're taken to the ticketing provider so they can buy a seat. Click a link in a score update, and they;re taken to a content provider's page with live play-by-play.Part of the challenge in this is getting content providers to make this sort of information available in RSS.

This, of course, isn't a challenge for AOL, which owns several properties like Moviefone and CityGuide where it's got content it can port to the format, and it's also got considerable stroke with third-party providers to get them onboard.

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