I hear that this mobile web thing is going to be big. Of course, there is a conflict between mobile and web: the first implies a small device, the second implies a wealth of content, mostly developed with larger devices in mind.
One way to address this conflict is to take web content and make it mobile-ready. This is the approach taken by MoFuse.
MoFuse is best illustrated with an example, and this blog provides such an example. MoFuse reads the RSS feed and generates from it a “mobilized” blog. That blog has its own URI: http://changingway.mofuse.mobi/. WordPlay, the blog where I play around with WordPress classic (i.e. WordPress but not WordPress.com), also has a mobilized version.
There’s more to MoFuse, but that’s the basic idea. A basic design decision is to take the content in feed form. A basic business decision is use the freemium model. The free component just got bigger, in that MoFuse has done away with its Professional account level and moved the Professional features into the free version. It was Mashable Adam’s post about this change that prompted me to try MoFuse.
It seems that MoFuse is looking more toward ad revenue than publisher payments. It allows you to use one of two mobile ad programs: AdMob (recommended) and Google AdSense. You and MoFuse split the revenue 50/50. If you want all the revenue, you can upgrade to a Professional account… hang on, didn’t they just do away with that?
It seems that mofuse.com has yet to catch up with the changes in account types. Perhaps the account types and price points themselves have yet to be (re)defined. But that’s probably a transient issue, and it’s not my biggest concern with MoFuse.
That concern is: how usable is the result of MoFuse’s “mobilize the feed” technology? Consider WordPlay, its use of the Yahoo Media Player, and this post, which relies on said player. It doesn’t work, because the javascript that invokes YMP didn’t make it into the mobilized blog. I suspect that there are many examples of this sort of thing. In fact, I’m sure that there are better examples of the mobile version not reflecting the web version. My blogs are relatively low on multimedia.
Elaborating on the concern, and on approaches to the mobile web, would overflow this post. The post has already flowed over into tomorrow. More on the mobile web, and probably on MoFuse, soon.
Andrew, YMP deliberately drops out when it finds itself on the iphone. This is to let you just click on the mp3 link as normal and have quicktime open the file. It’s actually a pro-mobile feature to do things this way instead of with something like the 1pixelout player that would hide the link and not let you play the mp3 player even though you have quicktime right there.
Lucas, thanks for the rapid clarification.