Back in April, we discussed some of the differences between Yahoo! Go and and their other mobile offerings. More Yahoo! mobile news this week at the 2008 Computer Electronics Show, where Jerry Yang and company announced Yahoo! would be opening up their mobile platform to developers.

This comes on the heels of Google’s very similar Android announcement in November. What does all this mean? There will be more opportunities for mobile developers and content owners, and in the end, more mobile options for the end users.

The other Yahoo! announcement was the beta release of version 3.0 of Yahoo! Go. There’s quite a bit to explore in this version, and one in particular is the mobile widgets. The selection of widgets available today is pretty sparse (MySpace and MTV, to name two), but that will undoubtedly grow over the next several weeks and months.

It’s only January 10 and this year is already shaping up to be a promising one for the mobile web. Go take a look!

Mobile Websites:

http://mobile.yahoo.com/go

Or, enter this URL in your mobile browser to go straight to the the mobile widget gallery: get.go.yahoo.com

We at MobileMammoth.com have put together our Top 7 Mobile Websites from 2007.

If you surf the web from your phone at all, then you really need to consider bookmarking these in your mobile browser. They are all truly useful, and will save you time all year round. So without further delay, here they are:

Top 7 Mobile Wesbites of 2007

1. Bloglines (Skweezed)

Bloglines is one of the most popular RSS readers on the web, and now that they’ve integrated Skweezer’s mobile browsing gateway, mobile users are touting it’s ease of use. If you already use Google Reader to browse your RSS feeds, their mobile version will do you just fine.

2. The Weather Channel

There are some alternative mobile weather sites out there, but so far the Weather Channel stays on top.

3. Yahoo! Mail

You will need to go here and enter your mobile phone number for the link, or type m.yahoo.com into your mobile browser and click on the Mail link.

4. Google Search

Much like Yahoo!’s directions, you will need to go here and enter your mobile phone number for the link, or type mobile.google.com into your mobile browser.

5. FlightStats

As noted by one of our readers in our mobile website contest, FlightStats provides a variety of useful tools to make sure you optimize your time on travel days.

6. Dodgeball

This social networking service lets people “check in” through Dodgeball, which in turn alerts your friends of where you are. There’s a lot more to it, so go check it out.

7. ESPN

Still the most comprehensive sports destination, and the mobile interface works well. A visit there today showed one small graphic on the mobile home page (to save bandwidth), and the navigation items on the bottom of the screen where they belong on a mobile display.

And because we always like to exceed expectations, here’s one more site for your mobile browsing pleasure…

8. Google Maps

I much prefer Google Maps over MapQuest for its accuracy and intuitive interface. The same holds true for the mobile web. To visit Google Maps for Mobile, click here and enter your mobile number, or text “MYLOCATION” to 33669.

Enjoy these sites, add some more in the comments to this post, and Happy New Year!

Today’s mobile website is about saving you time. Who enjoys waiting in line for 20 minutes to order their food, and then wait another 15 for the food to be ready?

If your answer was “Not Me!”, then see what mobile website allows you to use your mobile phone to skip the line.

GoMobo allows people to save time by texting in their order to their favorite local restaurant. Assuming the restaurant is one of the many already signed up with GoMobo, you will be able to pick it up with no wait. The service is free to the end users.

Check it out for yourself!

Mobile Website:

GoMobo.com

For anyone just starting to use the web browser on their mobile phone, or who don’t yet have a core set of mobile sites they use on a regular basis, then this post is for you.

Essential sites for the mobile web include local search, weather, traffic, maps, and email. While there are plenty of more fun and exciting mobile websites out there, these are the most practical, and often-used sites that everyone should have bookmarked in their phone.

Mobile and Local Search

Google Mobile
Yahoo! oneSearch (this now includes links to directions, Yahoo Email, and more.)
Ask Mobile
MSN Live Search

Local Weather

Weather Channel

Local Traffic

Traffic.com Alerts

Mobile Maps and Directions

Google Directions
Google Maps
Mapquest Directions
Mapquest Maps (WAP Version)

Mobile eMail

GMail Mobile
Yahoo! oneSearch

It’s important to note that many of the major search engine firms now provide a single entry point to their mobile services, including search, email, and maps. You’ll notice that at varying degrees with Google, Yahoo!, and Ask, and we will probably see more of that as the mobile offerings evolve.

What about you?

Do you have a few go-to mobile sites that you visit on a regular basis? Let us know in the comments below.

Want to use Yahoo on your cell phone? Great, just use Yahoo Go. Or should you use Yahoo Mobile? Wait, maybe it’s Yahoo oneSearch?

Yes, it is confusing. No, it shouldn’t be. Such is the current world of the mobile web, where companies are stammering to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what’s the name that subsumes the words mobile, Web 2.0, search, phone, widget, gadget, beta, and yes, now gamma, all into one.

You may have seen our earlier, high-level article on mobile search sites. Today we will focus on Yahoo!’s mobile search services, Yahoo! Go and Yahoo! oneSearch, and when to use them.

Yahoo Go 2.0 (Gamma)

Of the three Yahoo! mobile services, Yahoo! Go is the only one that is actually an app for your cell phone. Navigation is centered around the concept of a carousel, and they let you navigate around that carousel to the widget of your choice. Current widgets include pictures, travel, weather, entertainment, news headlines, and more.

Another widget is the actual oneSearch tool, explained further below, which I have found to be very handy.

Since Yahoo Go! caches a lot of the data, it can be very useful when you are out your network’s service area. To find the phones that support Yahoo! Go, start here. To find the wireless plans that support Yahoo! Go, start here.

Yahoo! oneSearch

URL: http://m.yahoo.com
Like the name implies, Yahoo! oneSearch attempts to provide all the relevant “instant answers” on “just about anything.” The idea is that the information you are looking for should almost always be included in that first set of results. For example, if you are in Chicago for work and are looking to see what is going on that night, a Yahoo oneSearch query for Chicago provides information on weather, traffic, events, news, photos, and city guide links.

To use oneSearch, browse to the mobile site from your phone, then search for any topic. Many of the typical mobile queries are for timely information such as weather forecasts, stock quotes, or sports scores. oneSearch covers these well, but also provides timely information for say, current prices for a digital camera, or even headlines related to a certain person.

If you haven’t tried any of the mobile web services yet, give them a try the next time you are on a business trip. I think you’ll find a new way to use your time wisely.

Charles Knight over at ReadWriteWeb augmented his list of mobile search-related sites. The original list posted in January had 55 mobile-search sites, and now an additional 30 have been added.
The list includes the standard mobile search sites from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, and then gets interesting, with everything from the Century21 Mobile site for searching nearby homes, to Sitofun, which lets you receive calls from your website to your cell phone.
While the list certainly goes beyond mobile-search sites, what I like about it is that Charles organized it very well for us. Not only does the list include the Snap pop-up image of the site as you mouse-over the link, but he also provided an Excel version of the list for download. Thanks Charles!

Today Yahoo! unveiled their new mobile search service, dubbed oneSearch. This represents a significant change in that Yahoo! is truly treating the mobile medium differently than the traditional desktop search, and for good reason.

Specifically, Yahoo! is attempting to deliver the information the mobile web user is looking for immediately, without asking the user to select from a list of search results. This is based on the idea that the cell phone web user is looking for specific types of information (think stock quotes, local weather, product reviews, etc.) immediately. Read more about it here.

Google understands this concept as well, as you may have read in our earlier article, Mobile Search Sites, Part 1. If you haven’t tried out any of the mobile search engines yet, here they are:

• Google Mobile
• Yahoo! oneSearch
• Ask Mobile Search
• MSN Windows Live Search for Mobile

So what do you think?

Don’t you hate it when your non-sports-loving side of the family plans a non-sports event during a big game? If you find yourself in this situation for Sunday’s Super Bowl XLI between the Bears and the Colts, fear not. MobileMammoth is here to help with resources to help you keep track of the big game.

NFL Wireless from NFL.com

The league’s NFL Wireless offerings do provide a few different options fulfilled through their partners. One option is simply to navigate to the www.nfl.com URL from your cell phone browser. Like many large sites today, nfl.com detects that you are browsing from a mobile device, and displays a mobile-friendly page. There are seven menu options including News, Scores, Stats and Help. Navigating to the Scores link, and then to Super Bowl, it presents you with a clean, simple display of the score, as you can see in the image to the right.
Of course, I don’t want to have to check the score myself every 10 minutes. Bring the score to me. Tell me when something happens. Me, Me, Me. For this, NFL.com has partnered with Sprint to offer the NFL Network channel on Sprint TV. While this package does include alerts, clearly it provides much more than our topic of getting NFL scores on your cell phone. So let’s look at some other options.

Super Bowl 41 Scores from SportsAlert.net

SportsAlert.net offers three different score alert packages, with fees ranging from free to $20 per year. There is no charge for the “Standard” package, which provides final scores to the sports and teams selected upon registration.

The “Custom” package lets the user select specific sports, and teams within those sports, to receive live scoring updates. You can set it up to receive scoring updates upon each score, after each period, or after lead changes, for example. This service also enables you to get scores on-demand by sending specific text messages with the team name your are interested in. In addition to scoring updates from the NFL, you can also select teams from NCAA Basketball, NCAA Football, NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball.

Finally, SportsAlert.net also provides a “Premium” package. At a rate of $20 per year, you can select a seemingly unlimited number of teams within the sports listed above. If a user initially selects the Custom package and selects 3 or more teams, they will automatically change that to a Premium package so that it is more cost effective for the user. It’s nice to see someone looking out for their users.

Sports Alerts from Yahoo! Alerts

Of course, may of the larger Web portals/search engines/communities also offer mobile alerts. The description of the Yahoo! Alerts service from their page here is as follows:

Yahoo! Alerts enable you to get score updates on your favorite teams sent directly to your cell phone or pager! You choose your teams and when you want the alerts: start of game, every score change, when game ends, etc. Never miss crucial game updates while working or traveling.

So if your niece’s birthday party might possibly hover past kick-off time on Super Bowl Sunday, get yourself on one of these services now.
What mobile alert service do you subscribe to? How instantaneous are the updates?

Ingenio announced yesterday that MSN will begin displaying pay-per-call ads on its Windows Live Search service for mobile phones and PDAs.

When displayed, the ads will allow the user to click on an ad relevant to their search. When the user selects an ad, a call is automatically placed to the advertiser.

Think about this for a minute. When you consider all the ads that we put up with on various forms of media, this is without question one of the most convenient types of ads for the end user. If you are interested in what the ad is offering, you are immediately put in touch with someone over the phone. You actually talk to someone. There are very few ads that provide this type of opportunity for immediate interaction, and that’s good for both the customer and the advertiser.

Pay-per-call ads are certainly not new, even for mobile search. Other search engines such as Yahoo and Google have either already begun pay-per-call ads for mobile search, or are experimenting with it as we speak. Nonetheless, the increasing amount of investment dollars going towards improving the mobile web experience is getting interesting, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.