Commentary

Skyfire Adds Social Networking Powers To Its Mobile Browser

Today, Skyfire announced the latest beta build of its mobile browser for the Windows Mobile and S60 platforms. The biggest changes with this newest version are native integration of Facebook and Twitter feeds. Skyfire wants you to get your social on!

Today, Skyfire announced the latest beta build of its mobile browser for the Windows Mobile and S60 platforms. The biggest changes with this newest version are native integration of Facebook and Twitter feeds. Skyfire wants you to get your social on!It's a pretty telling sign that social networking tools are really catching on when companies such as Skyfire build native support for them directly into products such as the 0.9 beta of the Skyfire browser.

Skyfire says it wants it to be easier for users to reach the content -- and the people -- that they want to. With this 0.9 beta, "users with Facebook and Twitter accounts can import their news feeds and Twitter streams into Skyfire and easily publish their status to these networks. Users can also share and publish any Web page to their Facebook and Twitter streams by simply going to the share menu in the Skyfire browser," said Skyfire in a prepared statement.


More Mobility Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

I've tested this feature out over the last day or so on a Nokia E71. Skyfire tied in Facebook and Twitter adeptly. In fact, since there is a scarcity of good Twitter clients for the S60 platform, I'd say that Skyfire 0.9 is a Twitter user's best bet to enjoy Twitter from their handset. Facebook works well, too, though I can't say it is any better than the actual Facebook application for S60. What the Facebook integration does, however, is allow users to stay within the browser environment, rather than exiting to launch the Facebook application itself.

But that's not all 0.9 does. It also has a "real-time activity wall," which is Skyfire's way of saying "feed aggregator." In other words, any RSS-type content that you want collected by the browser, Skyfire is offering users a place to see it all. Skyfire has feeds for Digg, ESPN, Google News, Hulu, YouTube, and Yahoo News pre-loaded, but it also is completely user customizable.

Aside from all this fancy social networking stuff, Skyfire 0.9 also manages to improve the overall usability of the browser. It has made text rendering better, and reduced the amount of scrolling necessary to see content.

It also supports more resolutions and more Windows Mobile phones.

The beta software is a free download. Skyfire suggests that users uninstall any previous versions of Skyfire that they may be running on their phones before installing the 0.9 beta.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links