Mad About Mippin

Since getting the sluggish Nintendo Opera Browser and finding that Mippin worked really well, I've been using it alot more on the mobile as well. Then yesterday I noticed that the link to our Mippin site wasn't working, I've fixed this and while I was at it, thought it might be nice to post a little about Mippin and how why I use it so much.

I started using Mippin last year not long after venturing on the web with my Nokia 6120 Classic. It works well using the native browser but it really hurtles along using Opera Mini. This because the small pages are reduced in size even more by the Opera server and because Opera Mini caches pages, allowing you to surf backwards and forwards instantly.

Basically Mippin uses rss feeds to show any web site in a mobile format, you can use Mippin without signing up but for the few clicks it takes and the advantages gained, you might as well go the whole hog straight away.

Once signed in, you are presented with you're personalised home page, this includes your favourites which are built up by hitting the 'Add To Home Page' link at the bottom of every site that you view.

Selecting the 'My Latest Stories' link shows all the updates from your favorite sites in the last 24 hours. One thing I've noticed is that while you can search for any site and add a Mippin feed to your homepage, if it's not been added to the Mippin directory by the site owner, updates don't automatically show in your latest stories. So, if you have a site that's not already on Mippin you should head over to Mippin Maker and spend a few seconds adding it for free.

In addition to your favorites, you can also add widgets to your home page such as weather, news, popular stories etc. It is possible to add your own Twitter feed to your home page but for some reason this hasn't worked for some time, Twitter's own updates are usually about something else that's broken so the problem may be there.

However, you can still post Twitter updates from here and if you have set this up, you can Twitter any posts that you find through Mippin. This works great as it sorts out the url, all you have to do is add a short message if you wish, the resulting tweet then shows a link to the post viewed through Mippin which will work on just about any mobile, great stuff!

Something new on Mippin is social interaction, you can now add Mippin users to your connections, if they subsequently return the favour, you become friends and can send messages. I've never sent or received a message so I don't know how well this works but that's not really the best part of this new feature.

Once you've added a user to your connections, any site or post that user recommends appears on your home page, this is great because you can quickly connect to users with similar interests to yourself and follow the stories they've found interesting and in turn they can follow yours.

I can't see any way of searching for users but as you add sites to your home page, a user is shown that has also added that site. There are also 5 featured users shown on your home page, you can add these and also see who they are connected to and add those as well.

Selecting 'View Profile' from your home page shows the stories that you've shared, your favorites and your connections.

All in all, I'm finding that Mippin is a great tool for floating around the web and keeping up to date with what's going down in the world. If you've never tried it, give it a go and don't forget to add user Snowstorm to your list of connections if he pops up somewhere!

Paul.