"A Web Site for Every Mobile Phone"
NewBay Software launched a "Wireless Weblog" product at the recent 3GSM show in Cannes.
To weblog pundits, this should have some appeal, but to what extent it has wide appeal to mobile users is another matter. Of course, one can imagine that the functionality is limited, especially submitting blog reports via a text-message. But then it seems that NewBay have their eyes more on the multimedia messaging market. It is possible to post pictures and text to a blog.
It is not really a product aimed at "serious" (existing) bloggers. More likely it is an attempt at offering something for mass-consumption that would be white-labelled by the operator as part of their standard portal offering, or bundled into a multimedia services package, like Vodafone Live. Existing bloggers may opt to use interfaces like email, such as is already built into UserLand's Radio, albeit in a crude form and not able to handle images, but that is not much of an challenge to incorporate. Multimedia messaging by default is able to send MIME packaged messages to any email address, so a small script to extract the text and the image would suffice to add the message contents to the current blog (but don't ask me for the details as I don't write scripts for Radio).
At the heart of blogging is the passing of links to readers so they may delve into the subject matter more deeply. On standard MMS phones it is not possible to insert URLs into the message. In any case, it is difficult to imagine what kind of blogging would be done on the move from a phone, which probably suggests that such activities will be of limited interest to mobile users in general, although specialist "on the move" blogging activities can probably be envisaged.
No doubt this product, or something like it, will appear in some operator portal offerings, if only as an additional sales hook for picture messaging phones. Moreover, at the moment everything needs to be tried out to see where user interests lie in using next generation wireless services.
As NewBay confess in their own bumf:
"How will People Use FoneBlog? -
We don’t know for certain - but we’ve got some great ideas."
