FreeRange Prez Talks RSS

Jon Maroney is President of FreeRange Communications, a Portland, OR software company that develops RSS reader software for mobile phones. The company recently signed a deal with RSS feed synchronization service Attensa to make it easier to manage and view subscriptions feeds from any location. In the following Q&A, Jon discusses the challenges and benefits of reading RSS feeds from mobile phones.

Q: What are the options for delivering feeds to mobile browsers, and why would you chose WAP or a dedicated application?

A: First, RSS is simply the best way to get any kind of internet information- news, sports, blogs, weather, whatever you want - to your mobile phone, simply because it's concise and to the point. The phone companies have been limiting access to information by controlling what you can see on the phones' WAP home page. With RSS, the entire web is your oyster! WAP viewers are available from several web-based RSS vendors, including Bloglines and Newsgator. The advantage is they work on any WAP phone - the disadvantage is that WAP is really slow, only gives you limited information and you can only read your information when you are connected. As an alternative, dedicated applications are built for specific phones and have the advantage of being faster at getting the information you want onto your phone. Products like FreeNews download and store all the RSS feeds on your phone, so you can quickly scroll through them wherever you happen to be - they don't require a constant connection to the internet and are ideal for commuters. Dedicated applications also make it much easier to send an interesting article via email to someone else or follow links for further information.

Q: What should publishers be doing to make feeds more mobile-friendly?
A: Nothing! From a publishers standpoint, the beauty of RSS is that it works well anywhere. However, one thing that publishers should think about overall is how much information they put into the RSS feed in general. There's quite a debate about this going on right now. I think it really comes down to what you are publishing. If you want all your subscribers to consume as much of your content as possible, make it easy by putting as much as you can into the RSS feed. If you have other motives for your RSS feeds, then think about what works best to achieve those goals.

Q: What are the application and hardware challenges in delivering RSS to mobile devices?
A: The biggest challenge when you try to extend any internet or computer experience to a mobile device is the user's expectations. People expect browsing the internet on a phone to be relatively similar to how they do it on a computer. The reality is that most mobile devices still have slow processors, slow network speeds and small screens, leading people that do try to use the internet services to be very frustrated by the experience. Ask anyone if they've tried getting to the internet from their mobile devices, and 99% of them respond the same - it's either "No," or "Yes, ages ago and it was so frustrating that I never tried again." The challenges in developing an application for mobiles is to make a useful tool for people, that responds the way they expect it to respond and yet still makes sense within the confines of a mobile phone. We decided right away that what people want most is to have their information right there with them instead of having to navigate a WAP page to find the right location. We wanted someone to launch our product and immediately see all of their news and blogs.

Q: E-mail applications such as Outlook and Google's web-based Gmail are absorbing RSS reader functions. Why would people want to use stand alone readers in the future?
A: A lot of people like the idea of dividing the work that they do into segments. If you want to get caught up on what's happening in the world, you launch your RSS reader and when you want to interact you launch email. I think there is a place for desktop readers due to people's preferences. There are also a lot of people that don't want Google to know what they are reading or displaying advertising to them. for these people desktop reader is the way to go.
In terms of mobile devices, it's a non--issue. The size of mobile screens means you have to focus what you are doing to a single task. The screen just isn't big enough to usefully combine multiple functions into a single application.

Q:Can RSS be a replacement for email in certain business data streams?
A: Yes, it is already starting to in many organizations and showing great gains in efficiency. Email is great for interactive, 2 way communication. But a lot of the communication that goes on today in most organizations is informational - here's what you need to know to better do your job, get your health benefits, or talk about a product correctly, etc. These types of emails are about topics that you need to read and file to have for future reference - but you don't necessarily need to act on them or to reply to them. This kind of informational communication is ideal for RSS because it's always available and always current. You never need to worry about whether this is the current email or not - the latest information is always available (and spam-free) from internal RSS feeds.