OK well I got into the beginnings of a discussion with Daniel Appelquist this evening about how we go about defining the Mobile Web 2.0 movement. The first question that came up was do you mean mobile-web 2.0 or mobile web-2.0? So to define... I think there are 2 parts to this discussion, firstly web 2.0 in relation to mobile devices (mobile-web 2.0)i.e. the extensions of web 2.0 applications to mobile devices, and secondly the mobile version of web 2.0 (mobile web-2.0) i.e. the recent distinct steps that mobile has taken to get from stage 1. (Wap is C***) to stage 2.(where we are now -> where we are going to go!)
The cause of this discussion was to work out a panel of people to put forward for Mobile Monday in April. Initially Daniel asked me if I would be interested but I don't think that I necessarily have the experience for that if he means mobile web-2.0. For a start I've never had the time to create a mobile phone based rss reader, and I rarely blog to my site using my mobile and I have never ever tried uploading my photo's on my mobile to Flickr. (mainly because I hate inputting large quantities of data over mobile! It's clumsy, expensive and unusable!) If he meant how mobile has changed over the years... then possibly... I started playing with mobile applications when Visual Studio 2003 first came out in Beta test version and the first things I started playing with were web services and mobile applications over wap via gprs. (what a nightmare! no documentation, full of bugs and sooo unusable it was unbelievable) Today it has all changed rather a lot and we now have more usable, simple mobile apps online and also on devices that are starting to do useful things. I say starting because I believe they have an awful lot further to go before they really become mainstream, but there needs to be a lot of things that happen before that happens.
The key drivers for mobile applications and the mobile web to really take off in my mind seems to be very different to what the mobilists and the network service providers seem to think. To me mobile web and mobile applications will take off when the cost of data transfer is dramatically reduced, be it by open wifi access, cheaper data transfer through 3G or Wimax taking off and completely opening up the data transfer market.
Secondly I think that there needs to be a simple way of creating mobile interfaces cross platform and cross device. Easy as it may sound when people say just use the browser... what happens when you don't want to do that! What happens in sometimes connected systems? There are solutions for the PDA style phones but they aren't your average phone, they are for business use and for field service staff really... you can't easily fit them in your pocket for a start!
The usability of the interfaces to mobile really do need a lot of work doing on them to ensure that anyone and everyone can interact with their device. I think here a key factor is voice recognition and voice commands. How often in mobile devices do you find that you don't have enough time or hands free to do everything you need to do? How often is your attention caught by something else when working with a mobile device? How often are you trying to drive a car when needing to use your mobile? All these things need to be considered (and many, many more!)
I could go on further.... but I think that may be part 2, for another day!
Update: Part two coming up after Mobile Monday... let's see if my points of view are still valid after that! ;)
posted @ Wednesday, March 22, 2006 10:18 AM