BuddyBuzz for Reading on Your Phone

This is a little off-topic, but if you do a lot of reading on your phone like I do, and are looking for a solution to help you read a little faster, you might enjoy BuddyBuzz. BuddyBuzz is an experiment of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and is available for download at http://www.buddybuzz.net .

This is a program you download onto your cell phone so it won't work with every phone. It uses J2ME; there's a list of phones on which BuddyBuzz will work at the Web site (this isn't a complete list; the site urges you to try your own phone and e-mail them if it works.)

What BuddyBuzz does is allow you to read on your phone. Instead of giving you a screen's worth of words at a time, words are flashed on your screen one at a time at an adjustable speed. Stories pause at periods and commas, and quotes are delinated by a quote-mark on the left of the screen during the quote (which I found very slightly distracting as I was reading.) There's a variety of content available from the BuddyBuzz site, including Slashdot, news summaries, and other information. Once you have an account on the site you also have the option of uploading text or URL pointers to text, either for public consumption or for reading in your own "BuddyBox". The only problem I had was that my phone's backlight kept going off because I was busy reading and not scrolling around on the screen.

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