Mobilizing a Website

This week I was a bit shocked by the news that Mowser is pronounced dead by its founder. A perfect timing, because I was trying to do a short piece on services that can mobilize (format a website/blog for browsing in mobile phones) a website my blog (sorry guys, it’s very egocentric).

Basically, after browsing here and there, I know that there are a lot, really a lot of startups working in this area. Here’s what I found – the first 5 or 6 pages in Google search:

1. Of course, you can DIY. If you have a good hosting that can detect the user agent and a good CMS that can automatically convert the website. Or we can create a different website specifically for mobile phones. (Quite famous now with the m.* and *.mobi).

2. Then there is this transcoding like mowser and skweezer. These guys take a normal website and reformat it (including compressing the data/images) into a mobile website. I haven’t tried it with complex website though…

3. Next is the RSS to mobile web approach taken by mippin and feedm8. Instead of the full website, they fetch the RSS feed from a website (or blog, more appropriately) and serve it as a mobile website. Pretty cool. Mippin even gives you the option to monetize your site by inserting ads from AdMob.

4. Finally, a widget version of a blog. Made possible by the guys like mob-it, WidSets, and plusmo. Widgets are small applications that fetch content from the network – can be a java application or native applications (e.g. Symbian). WidSets is a good engine for creating a widget.

5. No need of mobile website: Opera Mini and S60 Browser can deliver a full web page on your mobile.

What do I prefer? Mowser (RIP) and mippin. Sometimes I need to have a quick and dirty browsing, so Mowser actually fit pretty well, compared to downloading a full website. Mippin works pretty good for a blog – because of its nature with RSS/feed.