A Feed Is Born

Skweezit: RSS solution or abuse?

by Juned on July 30th, 2007

John Cody’s Skweezit, the application that allows Windows Mobile Smartphones and Windows Mobile Pocket PCs users to view a version of a web page better formatted for the phone or pocket pc’s screen has been received with praise and criticism. One of its uses is to allow users to redirect the read more link in RSS feeds and point it to the full text post/or article from skweezer. Smartphone and pocket pc users have praised the device as … well as Arne of the::unwired said a nice little utility. There are those who differ.

Jason Calcanis in his post RSS Abuse: What’s fair use and what’s abuse. (or Skweezer gets it wrong) critized Skweezer for: One, Republishing other peoples websites; Two, Placing ads on said websites; Three, Sell an application based on said republished websites; and Four, Deny the original content creator of the websites the ability to track page views and readers.

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(Update: Received a comment and an update from Kevin Perkins CEO of Greenlight Wireless, the company behind Skweezer and he had this to say. You will also find this in the comments below but in the interest of fairness I decided to update this post with his statement in full:

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On other hand if you search for John Cody’s Skweezit the closest thing that can be found is a forum post at Omnisoft Forums, specifically here were Cody explained the history and function of the Skweezit application.

History: I created this app because I was tired of reading the brief summaries often found in RSS feeds. To read the full details of a story, you often have to click the “Read More Online…” link at the bottom of the RSS summary, but these links often point to a full-size webpage which can be very painful to load into Pocket Internet Explorer.

What it Does: Basically, this app intercepts most attempts to launch Pocket Internet Explorer from another app (like from an email message or an RSS reader), and instead will prompt you with “Skweeze it?”. If you say no, then Internet Explorer will launch normally to that link. But, if you say “Yes”, it will automatically filter the clicked URL through Skweezer.com so the webpage will load quicker and be better formatted for your device’s smaller screen. [Source]

In the last part of his post Calcanis wrote: blog:

… you offer this service for free without ads, sell it to the publisher, get permission, or split the advertising revenue, etc. you?re fine. But you don?t just come along and take the entire feed, republish it wholesale, and put your ads around it.

This seems like common sense to me, but I guess sometime tech folks start to justify abuse as technological innovation. Fair use is cool, that covers using a portion of a work?not the whole thing. [Source]

What do you think? Is Skweezit a solution or an abuse of RSS?

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