WebClip2Go.com lets you "clip" web pages and browse them on your mobile smartphone. For the impatient, you can scroll to the bottom of the page for tutorials on how to create web clips. If you wonder why WebClip2Go is needed in the world of "desktop fidelity" mobile browsers, please read our note to iphone users!

Web clipping for mobile

Most web sites are not designed for small mobile phone screens. They have lengthy sidebars, narrow columns, deep menus, and ads that look fine on PCs, but become unbearable glutters when displayed on mobile phones. Instead of trying to reformat the entire web page for mobile display, WebClip2Go allows you to clip web page snippets that are most relevant to mobile users.

For instance, when I read New York Times, I often skip directly to the "Most Email Articles" box at the low half of the 4th column on the front page. It is tedious to scroll that much even on the best mobile phone browsers. The New York Times Most Emailed Articles web clip (iphone simulator) picks out that box and let me view just the most emailed articles any time on my phone. When I click on any of the articles, it automatically brings me to the text version of the article with minimal ads, menus and other distractions. To get a link to the web clip via SMS (saves you typing on the phone), text wclip nyt to number 41411.

Web clipping not only allows users to choose relevant content for mobile phones from a sea of web contents, it also reduces bandwidth consumption on mobile phones since only a "clip" of a web page is send to the phone every time. That is an important factor if your mobile web access is charged by kilobytes (as most pay-as-you-go plan does). There are many other examples you can checkout:

Blogs, RSS and other feeds

The modern web is not just about HTML pages. More and more content is now available as "machine readable" services such as the RSS / ATOM feeds most blogs provide. WebClip2Go provides great support for RSS/ ATOM feeds. Feeds are automatically formatted according to the capability of your mobile phone. For instance, if you access a feed from an Apple iphone or a high-end Nokia, you will have all the dynamic text features; while on a low-end phone, only headlines and links to the full articles are displayed on the first screen to minimize clutter.

The full articles linked from the RSS / ATOM feeds are "clipped" the same way as regular web pages -- you can choose to extract just the main body of the article text, or choose to include comments, or whatever. Your choice.

To see an example of RSS feed in action on your mobile phone, point your browser to the Fake Steve Jobs Blog web clip (iphone simulator) to see the funniest technology blog ever written! To get a link to the web clip via SMS, text wclip apple to number 41411.

Or, you can simply text wclip blog to number 41411 to get mobile-friendly links to many interesting blogs. Here are some exmples:

Bookmarking, sharing, and taking advantage of other mobile content adaptors

With more and more content providers publishing their own mobile web sites, WebClip2Go.com empowers you to keep track of all those mobile sites with ease. For instance, the Wall Street Journal already has a mobile web site, but many people simply cannot remember the URL (the exact URL also changes as Wall Street Journal does testing / upgrades). With WebClip2Go, you can simply text wclip wsj to short number 41411 to get the latest mobile link to WSJ (iphone simulation). You will also get a list of links / web clips to sites that are related to the Wall Street Journal. You can add to that list by tagging your own related web clips with the tag "wall street journal".

Another example is the New York Times. Text in wclip nyt to get web clips associated with the New York Times. As you probably already noticed, when you go to a story page from any New York Times web clip, it automatically re-directs to the NYT official mobile site.

Similiarly, WebClip2Go.com leverages existing mobile web content adaptors such as Google and Mowser to handle links that are not yet available as web clips. For instance, when you view the RSS-based Planet Mozilla web clip (iphone simulation), you will notice that all links to individual posts are processed by the Mowser adaptor. You can easily setup your own web clips this way and choose Google or Mowser as content adaptor dependening on which one best handles the target pages.

Get Started

The easiest way to get started is simply to text the word wclip to number 41411 and open the link in the response SMS message. Alternatively, you can load the web site http://webclip2go.com/ in your mobile phone browser. From there, you can view any web clips our users submitted.

To truly take advantage of WebClip2Go.com, we recommend you register with our site (it is FREE!). As a registered user, you can

  • Customize your start page so that your favorite web clips show up on the first screen.
  • Create mobile web clips for your favorite sites and share it with everyone.

Go try it yourself!

Tutorials on how to create mobile web clips yourselves:

Or, if you are not inclined to build web clips yourself but still want to browse your favorite sites on your phone, you can email me at webclip2go AT ezee.com to suggest sites to "clip". I will clip it and email you back once it is done. :)