Those are not rivers, they are nice mobile news sites, but that’s not what a river is.

There’s a great Guardian article out today that explains.

http://tinyurl.com/py57l

Have a read, maybe there’s something new for you to enjoy!

Dave

Skweezer is at http://www.skweezer.net/

http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com/2006/08/reinventing-the-mobile-web-with-dave-winer

Some due diligence would be welcome, Jeff. Or even a little research.

Read some phone blogs and find out.

The BBC has had its own “River” here since 1997
http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm

Didn’t Dave check, first?

See Google and Squeezer - rivers of news indeed.

http://www.google.com/reader/m/
http://squeezer.net/

Anything else?

There remain the design decisions of — full posts in the river or headlines only? Headlines then link to mobile translated pages from the site, or whatever’s in the RSS feed (full posts/abstracts)? Are comments valuable to a mobile user? But that said, not a lot left to work out there.

That all said, cred properly established, I think this rivers concept when applied to mobile browsing is quite cool, and everyone here saying Dave is reinventing the wheel, well, maybe it needs reinventing. Mobile web just has not caught on fast enough. The great thing about the rivers metaphor to me is that it merges tributaries — various feeds — and opens up a really nice potential for customization for the user.

I’ve found the mobile Bloglines product for PDAs completely unusable, for instance, as well as most of the mobile RSS readers I’ve tried, to the point of giving them up, and I just hit sites like Kottke’s remainders on my Blackberry, and wait til I get on a laptop to read the other feeds I like.

Now, imagine if Bloglines or My Yahoo launches a personalized rivers product tomorrow. Log in, check off the sites you want to follow via mobile, enter your blackberry email address, and a minute later, you get a link to your personalized river of news sent to your phone. All your blog headlines, identified by author/feed, on one easy to load page, in reverse chron order. And if you really wanted to get fancy, a little pagination every 25 posts or so, the better to sip content if on a slower phone or network.

I want that.

If I had a little more ambition, I’d stay up tonight and build it, figure out a way to insert some text ads here and there from various Web 2.0 startups — then announce the new company right here in this post.

But instead, I’m hoping some of you fine folks build this tomorrow, as like I said, I’d love to use it.

Check it out if you get a chance

Out of interest, compare http://techcrunch.scripting.com/ with http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch and http://www.techcrunch.com/ with CSS disabled.

Plinkit

I’m pretty sure that xFruits do this well! Check out their web site!

It may not be terribly fancy but even with GPRS on my very plain Nokia I get a nice set of headlines for my feed. The problems arise when you try to read apost, they are a bit wider than my puny screen. Otherwise wonderful!

Eoin

And don’t you start crying a river for BBC Here again, light mobile content has always been there : http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm

Nothing new here.

More on this at : http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com/2006/08/reinventing-the-mobile-web-with-dave-winer

http://buzzmachine.scripting.com/

And thanks for the writeup, I’m really excited about the Times river, and there’s more on the way…