Tuesday, October 9, 2007

MoFuse Creates Mobile Version of Your Website

MoFuse is a new service that many publishers today have a need for. MoFuse stands for "Mobile Fusion" and it enables you to create a mobile version of your website. It's similar to Winksite, a mobile conversion and community service that counts BoingBoing among its customers. However MoFuse is simpler, in that it doesn't offer community features. If anything it's like "Feedburner for mobile", because all you need to do is provide your RSS feed and then MoFuse automatically converts it to a mobile version. Also like Feedburner, MoFuse is starting off by targeting blogs.

MoFuse is currently invite-only, but Read/WriteWeb has exclusive access to invites. Simply go to http://snapple.mofuse.com/register/RWWEB and enter your details. There are 200 invitations available, on a first-come first-serve basis.

Here is the test mobile version of Read/WriteWeb: http://m.mofuse.com/readwriteweb. The screenshots below shows how it looks:


Homepage


Post page

The screenshots show a fairly simple layout, but it includes essential images and neatly displays content for reading on a mobile device. Essentially MoFuse cuts out all unnecessary images, formats the text for mobile, makes it easily navigatible -- and generally presents a much better reading experience for mobile.

You can customize the look of your MoFuse mobile site using an AJAX color picker, as well as uploading a custom logo/header image file. You can also make some money by implementing AdSense mobile onto the pages, if you wish.

Testing my MoFuse Page in ready.mobi

With help from Mobile Web expert Rudy De Waele, I ran my new MoFuse page through the ready.mobi testing tool - which "evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards." The resulting test report was 4.95 / 5, or "Good". The 8kb download also puts the Web version of R/WW to shame!


ready.mobi report

MoFuse Admin

The admin part of MoFuse is slick -- and seems to be influenced by Feedburner's UI:


MoFuse admin screen

Conclusion

MoFuse is still in early beta, but already it's shaping up to be a very useful tool for bloggers. Winksite is pretty stiff competition though and I'm sure other startups will emerge in this space too. Indeed it's a service Feedburner itself should be providing, so it wouldn't surprise me if they get into the game soon too.

Let us know what you think of MoFuse and how it compares to similar services. Remember you can go to http://snapple.mofuse.com/register/RWWEB and get an invite.

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