Has anyone been able to get MobilePlay to work yet? The beta from the Rustic Canyon-backed firm has launched, and it has solid Treo support — as well as integrated readings apps for a one-off list of Nick Denton’s blogs — but while I could download the app to my Treo, it has, so far, failed repeatedly on attempted wireless synch to news sources.
[Update] Okay, I got in, and I now wish I hadn’t bothered. Whatever else MobilePlay’s merits, you get a cleaner and more economical view of news via the mobile version of Bloglines. I thought the days of over-branded news content, a time when a third (and sometimes more) of the screen was taken up by logos and ads, was long gone. Apparently not. Ugh.
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Thanks for at least trying our software. We had a couple of other bloggers write us off without even downloading. Appreciate your comments on the branding. Our major media partners like Weather.com and USATDODAY like to see their logos, but they can probably be smaller. Also we are free and ad supported, hence the banner ads. As for the comparisons to RSS, RSS is great, but it has its limitations. Most prominently big media companies don’t give away the entire article text via RSS. That’s why we have partnered with them to deliver ads along with the articles in a speciall RSS feed for us, so the customer gets the whole read.
We will also shortly launch movie listings, restaurants, trivia games, Sudoku and other ad-supported apps with functionality that RSS cannot even dream of providing, not to mention our ability to sync, update and cache content via wireless or desktop connection, so you can view content offline or even if you don’t have a carrier data plan. Hope you will take another look beneath the hood.