Reuters Mobile wholly dissected

[Alexander Turcic]

Reuters has a new mobile service offering 10 headline stories accompanied with full color photos (via PhoneMag and textually.org). The service requires you to download the Mediabricks Media Viewer, a customizable J2ME Java application that is compatible with various handsets.

I spent a few minutes looking at the Java midlet and found out that you can also access the news articles directly via your browser. I am sure with a small PHP or Perl script you could quickly write your own news engine. Rest assured, Reuters doesn't support it, or they would have made this information available first place (or even better: offer news articles in XML format). So it's up to you what you do with it. Here we go:

The general url is:
http://reutersnews.co.uk/mb/servlet/MorfServlet?service=TopNews&category=reuters-ad&spkey=Reuters.Ad.UK&country=us&dev=7650&object=

Before you can use it you must fill in the last parameter 'object'. See further below.
service
  Currently only 'TopNews'
category
  Always 'reuters-ad'.
spkey
  The service provider key. Without the proper key ('Reuters.Ad.UK' or 'Reuters.Ad.US') the service won't work.
country
  Either 'us' for Reuters US news or 'uk' for Reuters UK news
dev
  One of the supported devices - output might differ depending on selected device
  e.g. 
  7650
  6670
object
  One of the following paramters:
Headlines
  shows list of latest 10 articles with article ids
  example
Article
  shows article (required article id in &aid=)
  e.g.
  example
ArticleWithBinaries (required article id in &aid=)
  serves article as application/vnd.wap.wmlc
  e.g.
  example
ArticleWithImage (required article id in &aid=)
  serves article and (if available) article images as application/vnd.wap.wmlc
  e.g.
  example
Image (required article id in &aid=)
  serves (if available) image of an article
  e.g.
  example
Ticker
  shows a pretty Reuters tagline
Structure
  shows list of article ids of latest articles
Startup
  serves certificate, structure and ticker as application/vnd.wap.wmlc