MobileCrunch skeptical about the “River” for Mobile Browsing

This morning i read a skeptical article from Oliver Starr at MobileCrunch about the “River of News” approach for reading news on mobiles.

I have a couple of problems with the points he is making. Disclaimer: i have been developing a river style aggregator since last june and I have used it during the summer while travelling.
The first point is that no matter what the publisher thinks, the only way to make mobile consuption of web content more widespread is to make it more user friendly, which also means to give less overhead to the content making it easier to consume.

btw we should remeber that mobile users are mostly paying by the byte they send or receive so are less willing to accept non-content data (including advertising).

I think that if this style will get widespread will be not for some major technical reason but because it is the best way for the user to get to the content his looking for.

The second problem regards the fact that by dissing the river style for the reason of advertising Oliver is actually going against the trend I have seen to consume more and more content through aggregators which may or may not present your ads to the reader.

I think that the implementation of the “rivers” will be something that will take place simply because the users will require it (or they will use tools that give them the content in that form), so it is eventually time to start thinking how you could sustain the effort of making a professional blog which is consumed through mobiles.

Update: Dave has clarified what is and what isn’t a river of news, and as he says you still have a news river if you put ads inside or if you make it heavy.

You can have a “rich” mode where the river presents all the media content inside the posts or where the posts are decorated with controls to republish or share them or do any kind of social interaction (much like what happens with the news river inside the OPML editor).

The flow of news in reverse chronological order is what makes the (mobile) reading experience hugely better (it’s usability not a technical feature!) but i still think that they will also need to be light to be really accessible for the readers.