Sprint Developers

RSS and WAP are two very powerful, yet underused technologies. And they become even more so when combined.

The biggest annoyance with using a WAP browser is having to jump around constantly to different sites to get all the information you want. With a traditional web browser, this is not a big deal, but it is much more awkward a task on many WAP browsers. Just to surf to a bookmarked site on the Samsung N400 takes more than 5 "clicks" vs 1 click in a traditional PC based browser. And typing in a URL manually is horribly difficult using a phone's 10 digit keypad. The cell providers are doing a better and better job of giving users a useable homepage for their WAP handsets, but these are not as customizeable as they could be. Users should be able to access the information they want, no more and no less, from one simple starting point.

Enter RSS. RSS feeds are growing in popularity. Almost all the major news sites offer some subset of their content via RSS. In addition, thousands of weblogs are syndicated, sometimes without their author's knowledge. Every livejournal weblog has an RSS feed for it generated automatically. RSS is a dialect of XML and is generally low in graphic content. These facts make it an ideal content delivery mothod for WAP handests which operate at relatively low transfer speeds and have trouble displaying more than text on their small screens. The problem with RSS feeds is that they are hard to find. Most sites that have feeds do a poor job of promoting their feeds. And sometimes, as in the case of livejournals, a content author isn't even aware that they have a feed. If you want to access a site's content via RSS, it is not uncommon to have to dig several links deep into a site to find the feed. Then, you have to copy and incredibly long, cryptic URL into your RSS aggregator in order to access the information in the feed.

CellFeeds.com is making an effort to solve these problems. Using the site, users can create and manage their own custom list of RSS feeds from their PC and then read them from their WAP handset. To save users from copying and pasting the long ugly URLs that RSS feeds often have, the site offers users a selection of preprogrammed feeds that they can choose to add to their list. Additionally, a user can add anyone's livejournal to their list just by knowing the person's livejournal user name.