Monday Morning Update!
Well, it’s not actually Monday morning for me, it’s more like a really late Sunday evening… ;-) That said, I wanted to give a quick update before I took a “nap”.
First the exciting news is that my old pal Seni Sangrujee has agreed to join up with me, so we’re now the Mowser Team rather than just, you know, a lone crackpot with a mobile website. Seni and I were part of a San Francisco crew (CafeSF!) trying to start companies during the tail end of the bubble in 1999, but neither of us got lucky, so it’s great to have someone around who’s been there and done that and is willing to help out right away. He’s keeping his day job for now, but hopefully we can fix that soon enough.
Seni’s already helped code up his first new Mowser feature! He worked out the gritty details of a TinyUrl-style link service, which I just launched a few minutes ago. You can pass in a long url and get back a nice tiny Mowser Shortcut which will easily fit in an SMS or Twitter message… TinyUrl is awesome, but all the Mowser Shortcuts pass through the content adaption engine, so the link should always work on the phone. Great for driving directions, etc.
And speaking of Twitter, that’s the next bit of news - I took a minute and slapped in a Twitter form into the Shortcuts page, so once you’ve created your fancy-shmancy new mobile url, you can then immediately send it off to all your Twitter buddies just by entering in your Twitter username and password. I want to add support for some other services as well, including a direct SMS to your phone (for taking stuff on the go) and integration with some other services like Jaiku as well. It seems there’s quite a few Jaiku users of Mowser already, actually, but the API isn’t as open as Twitter’s so I’m going to need to play with it a bit and see if I can make it work the same way.
I also got some bug-fixes wacked this weekend - Dennis from Wap Review helped me track down a weird redirect bug which was affecting Nextel phones. Turns out I was being dumb with mod_rewrite. Hopefully that’s fixed now. Thanks Dennis!! Also, I finally got the automatic redirect working (without endless loops) so any site like Digg or Winksite will automatically forward to their mobile versions rather than using the adapter. I already got asked in #mobitopia whether there could be a way around that with a setting, but again, I’m trying to stay as stateless (i.e. no signups) as possible for now. I’m sure some day, Mowser will get to the point that it’ll be super tweakable, but for now I’m trying to increase the quality of the service for everyone, not just the power users.
Okay, that’s all for now, but there’s lots more coming… so stay tuned! And again, if you have any thoughts, comments, bugs or feel the need to send the FBI after me, please feel free to email me at russ@mowser.com. Thanks!
-Russ