SUMMARY: Wall Street Journal "PDA newsfeed" via AvantGo terminated. Why?

DETAILS:

I tend to read a lot of news on my PDA (happens to be a fully-loaded iPaq 5550, about which I wrote an extended review and update). There are many reasons for this... most important of all being the anytime/anyplace functionality and just-big-enough form factor of the iPaq to make this a worthwhile (and generally quite informative) end-user experience. Because I'm always synched with my emails, I get any RSS blogfeeds automatically via NewsGator, which is synched with my email Inbox and therefore with my PDA. At the same time, I always run AvantGo's ActiveSync module, so I also get a number of 'channels', i.e. news-feeds available via the AvantGo's free service.

Importantly for me as an avid news-hound, the different services tend to provide very different subjective experiences. Whenever possible, I like reading selected bloggers and news sources in their 'native habitats', i.e. the web browsing experience for which many of them are designed -- this is especially beneficial when multimedia snippets are included. In case of 'cognitive overload' (i.e. normal life), then quick perusal of many stories via a news aggregator is extremely valuable.

AvantGo differs from typical (automated) RSS feeds in that it is a 'clipping service', which offers a 'sensibly-rendered' variant of news feeds that look quite nice on a PDA, and contain all the important content. Not as rich as the full web experience, but not as impoverished as many RSS feeds. With this in mind, I was somewhat startled when browsing my AvantGo pages on my PDA late last night to see the following alert on my (rarely-accessed but sometimes-valuable) Wall Street Journal 'channel':

We are sorry to inform you that effective October 31, 2004, The Wall Street Journal Online's channel on AvantGo will no longer be available.

We appreciate your interest in our services, and would like to offer you a special subscription rate to the Online Journal's website, at WSJ.com. We'd also like to keep you informed of new mobile services we'll be offering in the near future.

Very interesting! Many AvantGo services are 'trailers' for a larger subscription service, so it may be that this trailer was simply not yielding enough click-throughs. In the past, I have noted blog entries such as this one asking

Anyone have any idea why AvantGo does not support RSS, RDF, and Atom feeds? Maybe the various aggregors have made AvantGo obsolete? I guess I can utilize NewsMob for now (no opml import support).

This is a very interesting question. My personal desire for a 'better subjective experience' via AvantGo-style clipping services may not accord with the financial realities of maintaining such a service, and the world of RSS feeds is rapidly growing, and providing very well-informed and viable competition!