Who Moved my Skweeze?

It used to be that you’d just have to suffer through Web withdrawals if you were out of WiFi range.

Enter Skweezer - which takes any web page and “skweezes” it down to a format that’s more suitable for your ultra-slick mobile phone or PDA. It’s US$14.99 per year for a service that doesn’t include ads.

It ain’t perfect though. Calcanis, and a bunch of other bloggers got rightfully hacked off at Skweezer for snagging RSS feeds, ripping out ads, and adding their own - essentially hijacking content to “skweeze” out profits.

Said Darren Rowe of ProBlogger:

Basically they are repackaging content of sites/blogs for viewing on PDAs and Phones. Not a bad idea in many respects - however they are taking complete posts and giving no real link backs. They are also stripping the advertisements from the sites also.

About the only thing that I can see on their version of my site that is linked directly back to and hosted on my site is the images. So not only are they using my content without giving me a way to benefit from what they are doing - but I’m also hosting their images.

This does not seem a fair deal to me.

The other thing that concerns me about this approach is that now there are two pages with almost identical content for each page on my site - there is duplicate content. Google does not look favorably upon duplicate content - it downgrades the ranking of sites that use it and I suspect that this practice will (and already has) downgraded the ranking of blogs that are duplicated in this way.

On the other side of the argument, Techdirt argues:

They’re not profiting off the content of others (if they’re profiting at all). They’re profiting off of the ability to provide a useful service that makes your content more valuable to the end users. Why aren’t these same people freaking out that Google indexes their site, makes it findable and (gasp! oh no!) puts text ads along the results page? If you hadn’t figured it out by now, the name of the game is providing what your customers or readers want or they’ll just go elsewhere. If a site won’t let me view the content in the best way for me, then why should I bother visiting it at all?

This all goes back to what I like to call the “who moved my cheese?” effect - which is when people are resistant to change for entirely legitimate reasons. Change is scary for companies just like it is for individuals. And the neverending pace of technology - from WiFi at 30,000 feet to the whole Web 2.0 thing - is one constant change. Industries from public relations to entertainment are feeling the “squeeze.” And their reaction - while understandable - does nothing to solve the problem.

For example: I tend to get irritated with the entertainment industry when they say that I’m “stealing” .mp3s or television shows off the Internet when they make no effort to make those shows and songs readily available for legal download. If I can’t find music on the iTunes store, I feel entirely justified in LimeWiring it. But the minute that ABC started putting Desperate Housewives up there, I stopped grabbing it off Bittorrent. I’d really rather pay - honestly.

Yes, it takes time to catch up with the pace of change. But given the “who moved my cheese?” effect, nobody would ever catch up at all if it weren’t for the folks out there “stealing.” And just when they finally catch up, something else will happen to ruffle their feathers. It’s that neverending give and take that moves us forward, and separates those that think ahead from those that get left behind.