The Mowser Wars

Get it?! Oh man that title took me all of 3 seconds to come up with.

Anyway… So Russ came out with Mowser. It’s quite cool, and does a great job of mobilizing pages with some extra meta-commands you can provide it to help it out. It fills the same transcoding need as Skweezer. Competition. It’s a good thing.

Now there’s this guy Kevin Perkins, the CEO of Greenlight Wireless, the makers of Skweezer – and he’s pissed:

Mowser inserts AdMob ads into my stream… WITHOUT my consent! By co-opting my content (and yours too if you have an RSS feed) these two companies earn money every time they mobilize your stuff.

No, I mean really pissed – like federal case pissed:

I’ve been contacted by some people about participating in a class-action lawsuit against both Russell Beattie as well as AdMob. At this point, I’m not going to comment any further. All I can say is, these two companies are harvesting your content for their own gain, and rather than taking civil action in by way of law suit, publishers should contact their ISPs, the FBI, and other authorities for fraud.

Here is some of Russ’ response:

The feed summary pages provide a mobile service similar to PC-oriented sites like Topix.net, Rojo, Original Signal and other ad-supported general news pages on the web. There’s a thumbnail snapshot of the item’s web page (grabbed from Snap.com right now), and then a 500 character excerpt of the articles, with no markup included (i.e. formatting, images or links). So even if a site provides “full” feeds, the feed summary page only displays a snippet of the content, and then links to the content adapter for the full article. The ads are separated cleanly from the snippets with a horizontal rule and well marked. Having advertising on these summary pages is both ethical and legal, and in point of fact, how RSS and Atom feeds were originally meant to be used, driving traffic back to the original publisher’s site, or in Mowser’s case, the mobile-adapted version.

I’ve met Russ, and although he was never known to pull any punches with his old blog, I can honestly say he’s a decent guy that really wants to see the mobile space grow and flourish in a consumer-friendly way. Likewise, although I haven’t met Kevin, I’ve interacted with Greenlight’s CTO, Barnabas, and I can honestly say that if he reflects the company as a whole, Greenlight are a bunch of really smart, passionate people as well who thoroughly enjoy what they do.

Given all of that, I’m not one to take personal sides here. But as a.. um.. person with content that I created that is potentially being exploited for cash by Mowser – I’m not very outraged. Not nearly as much as Kevin.

I equate it to search. My text generates search results in Google and many other search engines and lets them pump ads to the results page. The users are looking through a window at my content (and others), and that window comes at a cost. Yes, it’s probably a public-relations exercise that Russ is going to have to deal with. But is it a federal case? Really, I’m asking a question here.

One of the reasons I’m posting this is because the comments section in Kevin’s blog is closed – and you can’t post comments to the Mowser blog either. With Kevin claiming that many many people are up in arms and are asking him to start a class action law suit, but providing no names or links to those people (if I’m wrong, please point me to them), I think there should be a forum for people to express their outrage – or lack thereof. So feel free to use the comments below if you’re filled with RAGE!!! Or anti-RAGE!!! Or better yet, if you’re cool and neutral.

I have to admit though, the CEO of the direct competitor to the offending product leading the charge does a big credibility-minus-minus in my book. I’m not saying it’s unjustified, but maybe he should have gotten a friend to post or something. I started wondering how mean Russ was to Greenlight in the heyday of his blog, so I did a little search. Here’s what I came up with:

You can just see the history of the mobile web in those URLs actually. There are WML sites, text-only sites, sites for Avant-Go, sites for Palm Clipping, and sites for Pocket PCs. Only a handful of the sites in that list or this one are actually WAP2 (XHTML-MP), if any. And for most of the sites that are formated in a version that my phone can read, I’m better off using Skweezer to view them rather than bothering with the site’s mobile version as they’re all pretty useless.

Give me the option of just seeing the updated feeds and cut down the clutter. Also, where is the transcoder? Once I click out from Bloglines, it’s complete luck whether I’m able to see the linked web page on my mobile or not. Why haven’t they done something as simple as Skweezer or Phonifier for the pages and added that as an option for the mobile links?

Compliments abound. Honestly, I did a search! Here’s the link!

Again, I’m not saying this is unjustified. This is what I’m saying:

1. I’m not outraged.

2. I think both services are cool and I hope this competition makes them both better.

3. I think Kevin is casting a bad light on Greenlight as a whole as being spoil-sports when I know they’re very talented and can give Russ a run for his money.

4. Kevin should open comments in his posts so people can talk about this. Given that’s not the case, I’m offering my comment section. For my 3 regular readers

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