Mippin, a mobile feed reading service I looked at back in late 2007, has undergone a world of change in the last 10 months. On Tuesday night, the site is launching a new version aimed specifically at iPhone users--a growing segment of the market which will soon be even larger with the forthcoming release of the 3G model.
This new version follows in the footsteps of older iterations, but has been tweaked to fit the screen a little better, as well as deliver an overall performance increase in page load times. The company has also laid the groundwork for an upcoming recommendation system (launching in just a few weeks) that will learn from and adapt to your daily reading habits to give you suggestions of blogs and stories you should be looking at. This new system is based not only on keywords and previous reading history, but what other users have been reading and subscribing to.
Earlier Tuesday, I spoke with Mippin co-Founder Scott Beaumont about this new version, along with what's changed since I last looked at the product. Beaumont says that in 10 months Mippin has gone from covering 1,500 to 2,000 sites to tracking more than 92,000. From those, it's accumulated 12 million articles that can be searched in Mippin's story index.
One other thing that Beaumont is really excited about is how Mippin now handles the media found in blog posts. Besides pictures, audio and video regularly make their way into blog posts. Mippin would previously ignore this type of content. The new version will now convert Flash videos via a third-party service (in the background while you continue to browse), as well as natively play any audio files that have been embedded in posts. I gave it a spin on a non-YouTube video earlier--and while slow on EDGE it should be fairly nimble on the newer 3G handset or a hearty Wi-Fi connection.
The company has put together a comparison video of reading an RSS feed in Mippin compared with how long it takes to visit the normal page using gadget blog Engadget as a control. They're calling it the Pepsi challenge, but I think a far fairer comparison would be to stack it up against Google Reader for the iPhone, which can accomplish a similar feat albeit without the back and forth buttons to skip articles.
Another major difference between the two is that you can set Mippin up to act as a mobile Web start page, with a select group of feeds you want to read, along with customizable content Widgets (a la iGoogle). Google Reader mobile offers no such feat, but does let you open up several articles at a time on the same page. Beaumont says the team is working on an upcoming developer platform to let people create widgets for the start page element of the site, and share them in a centralized directory--something that should be popping up in the future.
I've embedded the Pepsi challenge video below.
If you're looking for another way to read Web content on your mobile phone, there's a new solution called Mippin that will let you browse and sort through popular Web feeds about as easily as you can using a desktop RSS browser. The service was created to tackle the problem of so many sites not offering a "mobile" version for cell phone users.
Browse your feeds by favicon, or the top stories voted on by the Mippin community.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Mippin serves a variety of feeds, which can be browsed and sorted by genre. You can also search by URL, and the service will do its best to convert the content into something resembling a story, with images in the right places. Unlike Google Reader's stark text approach, Mippin goes a little more visual, taking whatever pictures are on a post and adding them as a thumbnail next to the headline. It's a pleasing effect, and makes browsing headlines a little more enjoyable--similar to what Reddit Media has done on its site. The service supports itself through small text ads that bookend some of the feed directories and stories, but you won't find any annoying banners, click-through links, or story interruptions.
The real draw to the site is its directory, which is truly massive. There's page after page of links to good content. You can save the feeds you like to your "My Mippin" section, and share any particular story via e-mail or SMS. There's also an option to send it to Twitter, which unfortunately sends the Mippin-ized version of the story instead of its original link. In addition to its directory, the service also keeps track of what stories and feeds are getting the most play, and promotes them on the start page. You can also vote on a site's feed as being good or bad. The highest ranked sites have their own separate listing from the categories section, complete with a percentage of how many readers liked the feed.
Is Mippin that much better than Google Reader mobile when it comes to feeds? I'm not completely sold. While Mippin makes browsing a little more appealing, Google Reader still trumps Mippin by showing you what you haven't read, along with quick snippets of the article to help you decide whether to click on it. Google Reader also gives you a few more sharing options, depending on what the origin site offers, and shows you are any story comments. Nonetheless, I'm digging Mippin's approach--it's very fresh, clean, and useful, if you're looking to get some reading done on the go.
See also: Mowster, Bloglines Mobile, NextBlast ,NewsGator Mobile
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