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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!

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.

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.

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