Wordds is a new service that lets you read news articles and editorials from online magazines on your mobile phone for free. The site currently features content published in Wired, The New York Times, Business Week, Time, Economist, Salon, Newsweek, and a dozen other popular media publications.
The site first aggregates all featured content from selected news magazines/websites by analyzing their feeds and then aggregates individual stories by word count like 1,000 words, 2,000 words, etc. – this is to help people decide which story to read or skip based on how much time they have.
The layout appears different on desktop browsers, so be sure to type www.wordds.com into your mobile phone’s web browser or an e-book reader like Amazon’s Kindle for the real experience.
If you like a particular story or need to bookmark an article to read later, you can do so using your existing Google account. This increases the number of “likes” for this story, which is like receiving a Digg-style vote.
Now the controversial part. Wordds links directly to the printable version of all these news articles which are generally free of ads or graphics and therefore load faster on mobile phones. Linking to print versions of a story is not good practice as it robs web publishers of potential revenue, but let’s see how they react.
The service may even make sense for users who might be using a desktop computer but with a slow internet connection. The printable version of the stories will load faster because they are devoid of large widgets and graphics.
Related: Read full magazines for free