I’ve been doing some research on the best way to consume RSS feeds on a mobile device. Dave Winer’s New York Times River is great but you only get summaries of the stories and when you click through it takes you to the NY Times regular website.

Dave has also taken a few select blogs and created mobile versions like this one for Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion. Unfortunately Dave’s ability to take select sites and mobilize them doesn’t fulfill my mobile RSS reading needs. Individuals have the ability to create their own mobile versions of sites and blogs but I don’t expect that to happen in a massive way anytime soon.

So I did a bit of research to see how I could consume RSS feeds on my mobile device of choice, which happens to be a Nokia 6620.

My first thought was to find RSS feed reader software that I could load up onto my phone and then subscribe away. The pickins I found were very thin. I came across a service called LiteFeeds that allows users to manage feeds online and have them delivered to a mobile device via an application installed on the device. I had some problems with the LiteFeeds over the air install. Support is provided via email and I checked their blog and saw no updates since April of this year.

I decided to keep looking for another solution. I found a mobile feed reader created by Burning Door, the folks behind FeedBurner. The tool looks great but I couldn’t get it working on my device. It also appears that development on the tool has been halted so I can’t count on it to be updated to work with future devices.

At this point I figured that integration and support would continue to be an issue in a world where hardware is so varied and technology changes fast. I then started to think about a browser based solution. Then I remembered Google Reader.

I read on the Google Reader Blog a few months back that Google Reader had a new mobile component. I decided to try it out by viewing the subscriptions that I was maintaining in their tool. I access my subscriptions by pointing the web browser on my phone to www.google.com/reader/m. This has been working very well for me.

The feeds delivered by the mobile version of Google Reader load fast and maintain many of the (ever increasing) functions found on the regular version of the site. This is a very good mobile feed reading tool for mobile devices. And since it is browser based, chances are that your device will support it.

As a bonus of rediscovering Google Reader I’ve gotten the opportunity to see some of the enhanced features which have moved the service in the right direction over the last few months. This isn’t a full review of Google Reader so I’ll save those thoughts for a future post.

[tags]Social Media, RSS, Mobile, Nokia, 6620, Lite Feeds, Burning Door, Google, Google Reader, Analysis[/tags]