Peter Kaminski mentioned BuddyBuzz to Elle during Bloggercon, and she came home with a flyer about it. Russ lent me a 6600, so I figured I would try it out. It’s an interesting application. It uses the concept of rapid serial visual presentation, which means that one word is shown on the screen at a time and they’re shown in rapid sucession (for more info see this article). I do find information presented this way easier to read actually. For a news story at least. There’s no scanning the page each time you scroll and losing your place. I’ve found the experience to be quite pleasant actually. And that I can crank the speed up pretty high and still take in the story.

The application itself is a bit clunky, and the website seems to have a bunch of bugs (or maybe it’s currently under development). But it’s worth working through the issues to see how the actual presentation of information comes thru, especially if you’re interested in mobile devices and information delivery. There is a rating system that can be used to try to find articles that best match your interest, and the site talks about social networks (although I’ve seen none of that functionality on the site or in the app), but I haven’t fooled around with anything except reading new articles. I would be really interested in seeing this turn into something more. For instance, using RSS as the delivery mechanism and attention.xml to figure out what I want to read. A mobile newsreader that could show me just the articles that friends have liked, without images, and that are under 500 words long? That would be pretty cool. I would love to see this turn into something more.