Hi guys,
You may not know me, but I'm the developer who works on Daily Kos Mobile (m.dailykos.com). For the past year, the mobile site scraped content off of the normal Daily Kos site, re-presenting it in a mobile-friendly form. It worked this way primarily to reduce the load on the developers working on DK4, so they could focus on that effort and not on creating new APIs for the old site.
This diary is a status update on the Daily Kos Mobile site, now that DK4 is released.
First, thanks to the work of the Daily Kos server team, the mobile site will no longer need to scrape content from the site. Instead, it will be able to use an API they developed alongside DK4. In another diary, I will talk more about this API, and how it has improved my (third-party) development of the mobile site.
For now, the mobile site will regain its original read-only functionality, using a more reliable way of getting the data in the first place. This new version will have one immediate improvement: support for embedded YouTube videos on mobile devices.
Because DK4 has an API, it should also be possible to implement some logged-in-user functionality, like recommending diaries and seeing the number of new comments since you last logged in. Since I will need to work with the DK team on this, I don't have any timeline yet on these features. Keep an eye out for more information.
I'd be quite interested in your feedback on what kinds of things you would like the mobile site to be able to do, especially in light of the changes to the overall site with the launch of DK4. Keep in mind that mobile phones are a much more constrained environment, so new features will need to be added incrementally, and with care. I'm interested in the features you consider the most important.