shahine.com/omar/

Everyone is going gaga over Digg River, and River this, and general attention to something that's not news. For the longest time it's been in every web site's power to provide a mobile friendly version of their web page, it's just that no one has cared to do so (or if they have, you don't know about it cause typing www.somesite.com usually doesn't give you the mobile version on your phone). Dave Winer recently got a Blackberry and what's old is new, except now the spot light is pointing out the fact that in the past few years, nothing has changed the fact that most sites are still not readable or discoverable from a mobile device. Read this for a good synopsis of the exact situation.

However, the recent hoopla seems to be to create a new domain for your site (ending in river.com), and creating a mobile friendly version of your site and declaring victory. Ummm, I don't think so. That's not discoverable. Oh, and you didn't solve the problem of what happens when I click on any one of the links on Digg to read the article... yeah, I thought so... still sucks and is unreadable on a mobile device.

To me there are a few solutions.

1. Every web site go and build a mobile optimized version and have the server figure out if you are a mobile browser and provide the appropriate UI (if you are a new site then River of News). Also provide another standard mechanism of getting at the mobile content (mobile.sitename.com etc).
2. Read all the stuff you care about in a mobile RSS aggregator that is web accessible (NewsGator Mobile is a great example and what I use). I don't need DiggRiver.com because I can just go read my Digg feed on my mobile device the same way I can on the web, in Outlook, or in FeedDemon. No work required except supporting RSS.
3. Read the web through a mobile transformer. Both Google and Microsoft have software that will take a web site and make it mobile friendly.

None of these is perfect but I hardly see how this River business is anything special. At it's core it's not going to solve some of the biggest problems browsing the web on a mobile device.

It's nice that people are starting to pay attention to this again... and for that I'm sure Dave pointing a spot light at the problem will motivate some to attempt to address the situation, but I seriously doubt it will matter as you'll still need portal sites just to find out what all the mobile URLs are for these sites.

PS - Scott Hansleman recently added mobile support to dasBlog. However, you don't need to set up a new domain for your blog or do anything special (nor does Dave Winer). What you say? That's right, dasBlog uses some built in stuff in ASP.NET with some extra browser detection logic to figure out if you are a mobile device and automatically themes everything using a mobile skin making the site totally usable and readable on a mobile device. Nifty.