Michael Yuan

WebClip2Go is a free service that let users “clip” content from live web sites and make that content available on mobile phones. In essence, it lets you browse content from the regular Internet on your phone. Checkout the web-based iphone simulator (Safari or Firefox) for a quick sneak peek. WebClip2Go is a community-based open source project sponsored by the eZeeLabs (more on this later).

Okay, I hear you say: “Many of today’s smartphones can already render HTML sites (see the iphone!), and there are online services (google, mowser, or even opera mini, skyfire) that transcode the regular web sites for mobile. How is WebClip2Go different?” Well there are actually several compelling differences:

First, most web pages are designed for wide PC screens. They have loads of headers, menus, sidebars, javascript / flash elements, and are partitioned into horizontal columns — just look at New York Times. They display poorly even on advanced devices like the iphone (require a lot of scrolling and zooming). Furthermore, when the page is “adapted for mobile” through mobile browsers or online services, the least relevant information on the page (e.g, the header and left sidebar) tends to occupy the first several screens of the mobile browser. WebClip2Go lets YOU, the user, choose the most relevant content on the page, and show it directly on the mobile.

Second, since the web clip is only a small part of the original page, it loads much faster on the mobile phone. That is especially true for pages with a lot graphics — parallel loading of images is very slow on mobile networks. A very nice side effect is that you also save a lot of mobile data bandwidth if you are paying per KB for access.

Third, WebClip2Go provides a very easy way to read RSS-based web sites (e.g., blogs and news sites). You can quickly drill down from headlines to the full description, the full article, and full comments. That is much better than any mobile RSS reader I have seen.

Fourth, WebClip2Go works on a variety of mobile phones including the iphone, blackberry, Palm, windows mobile, Nokia Symbian, Linux-based phones. We are trying hard to make the site appear “native” on each of those platforms. Again, checkout our web-based iphone simulator on Safari or Firefox to see what we mean here.

Last but not least, WebClip2Go lets you manage your favorite web clips through a “fave list” and a tagging system. An example is how we bundled together resources for the SXSW 2008 conference. Just bookmark http://webclip2go.com/ and all your favorite sites / blogs will be right at your finger tip!

Still interested? Here are some quick FAQs.

Q: Can I sign up and create my own web clips now?

Yes, of course! However, keep in mind that a big objective of this project is provide easy visual tools to help users clip web sites. Those tools are not in place yet. So, you will have to brave the rather technical web interface. It typically takes an hour for a technical person to master web clip transformation. I know this is a lot of time and effort. But I think you will find it both fun and challenging once you get it going! You can start by reading those two tutorials.

Q: What about the outgoing links in web clips?

So, you created a web clip, but what about the links in the clipped text? In WebClip2Go, you can create further clips to handle those outgoing links so that the linked pages are “clipped” as well. Please see the RSS tutorial for more. Or, you can simple use a standard mobile transcoder, such as Google and Mowser, to transcode outgoing links. Mowser is the default transcoder we use.

Q: Is WebClip2Go an open source project?

Yes, it is. The project is sponsored by eZeeLabs, and the code will most likely be licensed as GPL to the public. I think a project like this can only be successful as an open source project. Why? Well, first of all, mobile content adaption is an unsolved problem. A lot of the stuff we do at WebClip2Go are highly experimental. We can only hope to find the “right way” with a lot of open discussions / trial and errors from the community. Second, there are just too many smartphones out there for us to write view templates for them. Our iphone template works well but it also required a lot of work / time to develop. An open source contributor can really help out here by developing a kick-ass view template for his/her favorite phones! So, if you have any ideas you’d like to contribute, please contact me and we will work out how to work together!

Q: Does WebClip2Go require registration to use?

Not really. Many features in WebClip2Go are available to any un-registered user. You need registration to add your own web clips or to build a “fave list” for yourself. Even if you do not wish to register, I would still appreciate it if you can email me your comments / suggestions / requests on how to improve the service.

Q: Where did you get this “web clip” idea?

Well, “web clip” is a well known concept used by Google and Apple. My idea is to make “web clips” available on the mobile phone — hence the WebClip2Go name. The technology is rooted in the Mozilla Joey project, which I have been a key contributors to for quite sometime. Joey pioneers the idea of creating “microsummary” from web sites and sent it to your own mobile phone. WebClip2Go takes one step further and allows any user to create web clips for any site and shares it with the world.