mobiseer is ma.gnolia for mobiles
28th of August 2007 by conor
The Nubiq guys in Waterford have been building applications for the mobile lifestyle for quite a while now. The mobiseer site (mobiseer.mobi from your phone) has just gone into public beta and is all about managing bookmarks of your favourite web-sites.
The site enables you to organise, tag, share and manage your favourite .mobi websites either via the site itself or your phone. I use the comparison to Ma.gnolia rather than the more obvious del.icio.us simply because the feature set is more closely aligned, particularly with groups and ratings. The .mobi version of the site is very fast to load on my N70 which is a critical requirement.
The core of the service is tagged bookmarking which alone is highly useful when optimised for a mobile device. The bookmarking features of Opera and Opera Mini on an N70 leave a lot to be desired. Whilst there are a few ways of accessing del.icio.us on a mobile device, they seem hacky. Ma.gnolia seems to have nothing for mobile and their design-heavy (and slow) site is probably not a good match for your phone.
As with any site like this, the first focus should be on the individual's needs and then on community. You can just use it as a personal store and ignore everything else. However the tag browsing, groups and ratings add useful social aspects to the site. In fact, given the slow uptake of the .mobi domain, this may be the best way of getting good mobile sites visible to a wider audience. The availability of RSS for most areas of the site is always key – I subscribe to tags of interest so that new bookmarks from users with similar tastes will bring me back to the site.
Note that the sites you bookmark do not have to be .mobi ones, but it would make sense that they are usable on a mobile (e.g. m.twitter.com). On that point, when I tried to load the .mobi on an N770, they obviously detected that I was not on a mobile and gave me the full site. However I was unable to logon. I actually use the m versions of many sites on the N770 for speed reasons. If I request the mobi version of a site, I wish it would give me what I asked for.
I particularly like the My Mobile feature which allows you to drag n drop your favourite bookmarks into the order you'd like to see them displayed by default when your phone connects to the site. Something which might be nice for the future would be bookmark import from IE, FF, del.icio.us and ma.gnolia. They could even go one better and recommend mobile variations of bookmarks as they are imported.
Whilst the site is in beta, I've noticed no major problems. Most issues are just normal fine-tuning ones like this user has not added any bookmarks when this user = you. They should also add some filtering on the landing-page featured bookmarks to remove the naughty ones!
This is a genuinely useful site both for desktop and mobile use and I would strongly consider setting it as my browser home on both N70 and N770.
Comment posted by MobiSeer
at 8/29/2007 3:20:13 PM
[] mobiseer is ma.gnolia for mobiles []
Comment posted by Conor O’Neill
at 8/28/2007 1:04:14 PM
That worked a treat Patsy, thanks!
Comment posted by Patsy Phelan
at 8/28/2007 10:51:00 AM
Hi Conor,
Thanks for the feedback and review. It is nice to finally be out there in BETA release. So keep the feedback coming 
At present we do device detection upon access to either our .mobi or .com domains. While this is not always perfect, it does work most of the time. As we currently support a multiple of device formats (HTML, XHTML-MP, WML etc.) we attempt to detect the device and render as appropriate. As mobile devices are getting better and better all the time we default to HTML if we cannot detect the device.
You can add the following flag to the URL to bypass the detection routines and simply force XHTML for your N770. See the following link, this flag will work on both the .mobi and .com domains.
http://www.mobiseer.mobi/?output=xhtml
Thanks again,
~Patsy