I recently stumbled upon Skweezer, a free mobile content reformatting service. Skweezer can take any web page and automatically reformat it (as well as any content it points to) to be more mobile friendly. That means simplifying the formatting to make it easier to read and stripping out unneeded markup to make the page faster to download.

For instance, here is skweezed CNN, which shaves almost 60k off the size of standard CNN page, and here is skweezer Jobster. On a mobile device with a slow network connection, the size savings are really significant.

Skweezer is quite a bit better than Google’s WAP reformatter, which won’t handle pages with query string parameters and which strips too much out of the content. (It strips all links and forms, for instance.)

Skweezer Integration with Berry 411 and Berry Bloglines

Berry 411 and Berry Bloglines pages were carefully optimized for mobile devices, but links to external content were always difficult to read.

You no doubt have guessed where this is leading– external links in the Berry apps are now automatically skweezed. If you click on a blog link in bloglines, or a web link related to a business in the yellow pages, for instance, you will notice that the page is mobile optimized. In addition, if you search for a web address (e.g. ‘cnn.com’) in the yellow pages, you’ll be automatically taken to the skweezed version. Compared with launching the browser and going to the Skweezer home page, this saves several steps, as well as giving the benefits of history and autocompletion on URLs.

This is all done on the server, no new download is required.

Ad supported reformatters?

Sweezer is supported via ads appended to the bottom of the page, so it can be used used in any mobile software or service. (There’s also a premium version for users who want to pay to avoid ads and gain additional features.)

There has been some controversy about whether Skweezer is playing fair by appending its own ads to the page. You might ask the same question about Google’s reformatter, however– it doesn’t append its own ad, but it does strip the sites ads, which by some measures is worse! On the other hand, Skweezer is expanding the audience for sites by making it accessible on more devices, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing for site owners.

There really needs to be a equivalent of robots.txt for proxies that says to what extent a site wishes its content to be remixed and reformatted.