David Harper’s Different Things

Feeds have evolved into a popular means of sharing content between sites and are now going mainstream as more people become aware of the benefits. The use of feeds to syndicate content to mobile devices is also increasing — placing a much needed focus on the quality and usefulness of the information contained in those feeds.

Case in point are event feeds. While greatly useful from the desktop, they usually fail from the mobiles user’s perspective because 1) the feed requires you to link off to content that is not optimized for mobile devices or 2) critical information is missing from the feed — either way the mobile experience becomes a dead end.

Thanks to Andy and Gordon over at Upcoming, WINKsite is now able to go beyond the limits of basic event feed publishing to deliver a more relevant, more precise means of mobile event distribution and device independent delivery.

Let me explain, while mobilizing the Metroblogging Network’s blog and event feeds we connected with the Upcoming team. We explained to them the challenges to mobile users as we understand them to be as well as our thoughts as to how the mobile experience could be improved. They listened.

After several emails passing ideas and specs back and forth, Upcoming modified their feeds with mobile users in mind (within 24 hours mind you.) Each Upcoming feed now contains additional information such as an event’s start date/time, venue name, location, and phone number (utilizing xCal extensions.) In addition, various URL parameters are now available providing various sorting and count options. Using these extensions, WINKsite was able to intelligently display various event information in our mobile UI as well as make those data (phone numbers for example) actionable. The mobile goodness doesn’t end there. These feed additions also will allow us to build other web services around these data. For example, Upcoming event feeds with Yahoo! Weather, Yahoo! Traffic, and direction feeds/APIs can now be mashed up to support a more useful and productive mobile experience.

More soon on additional ways WINKsite is working with partners to make feeds “Mobile-Friendly.”

Technorati Profile

WINKsite has helped Metroblogging go mobile across their network of 42 cities. We’re excited to be working with Sean, Jason and the rest of the Metroblogging Team.

Special thanks to Andy and Gordon over at Upcoming.org for adding some new tricks to their event feeds. With their help we were able to provide some additional mobile goodness for the Metroblogging Community (more on that in my next post.)

Just fire up a mobile browser and head over to http://cityname.metblogs.com/mobile/ and check it out on your phone.

Alternatively, select one of the metro links below to view it’s mobile site from our desktop emulator.

Metroblogging Atlanta
Metroblogging Austin
Metroblogging Bangalore
Metroblogging Bangkok
Metroblogging Berlin
Metroblogging Burmingham
Metroblogging Boston
Metroblogging Cayman
Metroblogging Chicago
Metroblogging Dallas
Metroblogging Denver
Metroblogging Detroit
Metroblogging Dubai
Metroblogging Dublin
Metroblogging Hawaii
Metroblogging Houston
Metroblogging Islamabad
Metroblogging Instanbul
Metroblogging Karachi
Metroblogging Lahore
Metroblogging London
Metroblogging Los Angeles
Metroblogging Manila
Metroblogging Melbourne
Metroblogging Miami
Metroblogging Minneapolis
Metroblogging Montreal
Metroblogging Mumbai
Metroblogging New Orleans
Metroblogging New York City
Metroblogging Orlando
Metroblogging Paris
Metroblogging Philadelphia
Metroblogging Phoenix
Metroblogging Portland
Metroblogging San Francisco
Metroblogging Orange County
Metroblogging Seattle
Metroblogging Singapore
Metroblogging Tokyo
Metroblogging Toronto
Metroblogging Vancouver
Metroblogging Vienna
Metroblogging Washington D.C.