Thursday, April 19, 2007

Mowser = Mobile Browser

I don't want to jump on the Mowser.com band wagon just yet. I've only discovered the site and have been doing some spelunking with it. One of the reasons I am excited to see this project is because of Russell Beattie. I followed Russ for a long time as a blogger on Mobile technology. No else even came close. I was sad to see him go. But excited to see that he has finally gotten something going in the space he loves.

Quickly Mowser.com basically makes a website readable in a mobile browser. Gee, just the other day I was complaining that browsing websites with Mobile Internet Explorer on my MDA sucked. Well, this is supposed to be the solution to that problem. I'm browsing as I type this. From what I can tell it strips out your template CSS and graphics and uses a Mowser version. The documentation states that you can include a CSS file in your templates header that will be used instead of the Mowser default. That's pretty cool.

I tried laura.moncur.org, digitalthom.com, chrisbrogan.com and vergenewmedia.com. Everything worked fine. I really wanted to see how vergenewmedia.com responded since it has a lot of video embedded in blog posts. I clicked on a couple of the videos but none of them worked probably a limitation of my MDA.

All in all if you are looking to get content on your mobile via a web browser (no matter which one) Mowser is looking to have a lot of potential. I'll continue to follow up on this great technology.

ScreenCast Demo
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4 comments:

  1. Ahh! So you're the one! I just noticed two memory errors in my logs stemming from vergenewmedia.com... ;-) Looks like my code decided to try to download those videos and covert them (which it can't do) and died trying. What it *should* do is forward along if it doesn't understand the content-type, but for some reason in this case it didn't, tried to load the videos into memory and hit a hard-cap I set on that.

    I'll definitely put it on the list and see if I can figure out what the deal is ASAP.

    Thanks!

    -Russ

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  2. Hey Russ, thanks for stopping by. Can't wait to see how the video fix works.

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  3. By the way the ad isn't inserted into your content, its at the very bottom of the page. You would have an argument if it were in the middle of your text, but its not. And there not even really ads.

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  4. Russell, unfortunately, is copying stuff we did like 3 years ago. So as far as a plug goes... whatever. The fact remains, however, that he's stealing content from publishers and with "Ads by AdMob"... and I, you, People.com, etc ... did NOT give permission to do so. This arrogance that he has about it is remarkable....

    http://kevinperkins.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/mowser-arrogant-about-ads/

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