Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I was fooling around with the Mobile Web Best Practices Validator, and the WordPress plugin wasn’t doing some stuff it expected. So here’s a version that does. I just got the main page working, there’s probably other stuff in there. And I hacked in a control in the version on my blog so I could force the mobile version. Check it. We need to hack that validator to impersonate mobile browsers too. Maybe tomorrow night.

Russell has a post about mobile marketing that lays down one of the primary reasons I’m happy to be working at AdMob. The flow of money into mobile publishing should bring about the same kind of growth that Adsense drove for small online publishers, which was possibly one of the big drivers behind the explosion of blogs. What somewhat surprized me (though not completely surprized unfortunately) during Mobile 2.0 was that a lot of people said it was “too early to monetize mobile”. Which just strikes me as a very United States focused (and Silicon Valley focused in particular) viewpoint. I’ve been talking to a lot of people who publish mobile only, they don’t have fixed web income to use in the meantime. They definitely don’t have venture money to use to grow their business. Allowing those folks to directly monetize the audiences they’re growing on mobile is the only way to make sure that the compelling apps get to survive. Otherwise the apps that survive are the ones that match the models that already exist or are tied to existing businesses with alternate income streams, and innovation in the space as a whole ends up suffering.

I’ve been included in the Planet Mobile Web aggregation of blogs. Looks like it should be a great resource for helping to move the mobile web effort forward. Thanks Dominique! In the interest of helping to push things along I would like to share an interesting little thinko with respect to mobile web stuff (hat tip to Sathya from MobiSiteGalore for pointing this out to me while demoing their mobile site creator). There’s an online tool available to check a site against the recommendations. Still alpha, of course, the recomendations are still being worked on. Here’s a few things to pay attention to:

• checking Nokia.mobi yields 50 errors
• Vodafone.mobi has 85
• the .mobi site for dotMobi itself has 5 errors
• the output of Google’s mobile transcoder yields about 18 per page
• the validator seems to fail completely on WML, which I still see being used quite a bit in off-portal independent mobile sites
• the Wordpress Mobile plugin output yields 27

It’s a tough chicken-or-the-egg kind of problem. Hard to get people to follow the best practices until there are already sites that follow the best practices. And as best practices there should be some samples of sites that do conform, otherwise they’re not really “practices”. Just collected recommendations.

So how to crack that nut? Working with the open source projects would certainly be one way. Do pages generated with WALL conform to the practices? That would be one way to bootstrap the collection of content, if all that automatically generated markup displayed the attributes checked for in the validator. Same goes for bits of open source like the Wordpress mobile plugin and the Drupal mobile theme. Getting huge swaths of content out of folks like Google and Skweezer by making sure their transcoding services output in a form that jives with the validator would also be a big win I suppose.

Daniel and I got together to sync up about Mobile 2 last week. Despite the very different tone of our follow up posts we actually agree with the take away from the conference (see Daniel’s post and my post). We both think it was a great mobile industry conference, there was litterally a flood of great information for people working in mobile and the people who were there had some great conversations and made some great connections. Where we think we didn’t do as well as we could have was in the driving toward the “2.0″ version of mobile. See Daniel’s What is “Mobile 2.0″ post for some of the principles and practices I was looking to discuss more at the event. We want to try to keep the conversation going online and see if we can refine and define a bit more, and perhaps carry the movement forward through future events. The What is “Mobile 2.0″ post is a great starting point, here are some other fantastic posts from the event:

• Brian Fling’s 10 Things I Learned at Mobile 2.0
• Paddy Byers’ post on Open Gardens
• A fantastic detailed set of commentary at WAP review of Mojeo, one of the services featured at the Launchpad that Peter organized
• Katie Fehrenbacher comparing Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 conferences, and commenting on the Launchpad presentations
• Anders from Abiro summarizes what I’m trying to express in one sentence: Everything we need is already in the phones.
• An attempt to evolve a diagram laying down the difference between the web and mobile, read only and read/write services

I just spotted MGTalk, an open source Java based Jabber client for mobile devices. I like the layout of the dialog form quite a bit. I need to load up Eclipse and poke around at this. With a font better suited to my preferences I think it would be fantastic. Normally in java based chat client you have to go off to a seperate form to enter text, losing any messages that come in as you’re entering your own text. That’s always a pain in IRC clients on the E61, which all expect you to be using a keypad instead of a keyboard. MGTalk works out great with the full keyboard though, and I would love to lift the form style and use it for an IRC client as well. Very nice.

I want to disagree with what Scott said about Mobile 2.0: “but it was the same old crowd with new, better-designed slides. As an industry, we are clearly still not ready to grab the opportunity and use whatever tactics necessary to grab it.” I don’t think the slides were really all that much better in terms of design, they were about what I had seen before. Overall I don’t think we achieved what I had set out to do, which was to draw the existing online world closer to the mobile world - carrying the principles of user focused design, transparency, and open platforms from one environment into the other. The event of course was not a failure, we made a lot of introductions and connections and hopefully have set the stage for the kind of evolution I think needs to happen. But we definitely aren’t where I was hoping to be.

So the rest of this is going to sound a bit rough, but take it as some tough love. Lots of people are really excited about the event and looking to try to push forward as quickly as we can to keep the movement up. There’s talk of doing another event some time soon, possibly in Europe somewhere. I would definitely love to see it happen, but given my overall position I’m not sure I would be able to make it. So here are some of my takeaways from the event to try to help whoever wants to build on what we did.

There was way too much powerpoint going on. Way too much. Way way way way too much. God, I wanted to slam my head into the table at times when people launched into their stock marketing pitch. 300 of the most passionate and driven people sitting in the audience in front of them and all they can do is yammer on with their canned schpeal? Very frusterating. Fortunately it didn’t keep people from communicating. It slowed it down however, and what I was looking to do was speed it up. Some of the folks were sponsors of the event, and other people besides me had significant social capital tied up in pulling the event together, so I couldn’t just shut people down the way we do at the MoMo meetings.

If I do this again, no sponsors. They’re more trouble than they’re worth. Or we need to do something like Niall and Om did with the widget conf. The sponsors gave money, and then someone else heard the pitches for who got to talk. The sponsorships weren’t tied to any other perks in any way. Excellent idea, wish I thought of that. Our event ended up costing somewhere around 50K to put on (though my numbers might be a bit dated in that respect I think it’s pretty close). We ended up with about 300 people in the room. Most everyone I spoke to said they would be willing to pay $200 for a day long event of the kind. That means we should be able to clear that 50K mark no problem.

We checked out the cell reception in the presentation room when we went to check out the venue, and it seemed to be good. However the day of the event there were a lot of issues with connectivity. I’m not sure what you can do to vet the situation further (and of course this is only really an issue in the US), but not having device connectivity is really a hinderance for people wanting to show off what should be the most kick ass stuff. Maybe getting a hold of a booster to use at the event would help out, just in case.

There are a bunch of hard issues that are in direct conflict that I don’t think we emerged and got talking about. Here’s just a sampling:

• Lots of people looking to publish new content for mobile were upset about the number of browsers and incompatible standards they needed to be familiar with in order to get anything up and online. However the people working in mobile for a while were pissed about anything that tried to plaster over all the differences they’ve spent years learning the ins and outs of and building up adaptations for.
• People coming from the web world insist that the only real way to get mobile used is to make sure that mobile and the web integrate well, that there should be seamless blending of the web and mobile. People coming from places without fixed internet access yell and scream that we really need to stop shoving the web into their perfectly usable mobile only environment.
• Mobile service providers list the myriad ways that people developing mobile applications and content can simply and easily put their content up online and start making money from it. People with mobile content and applications moan that none of the methods for publishing and monetizing their content and applications come anywhere near the simplicity they need, and they just can’t bear the margins provided.
• Existing web publishers keep telling us that mobile is just too early to try to make money off of, don’t bother trying yet cause the ecosystem isn’t ready. However people with novel new applications (the ones that are most well positioned to respect the context of mobile implicitly) have no chance to bring their disruptive application to fruition because the only way to make money is to bolt on a crappy web experience as well.
• People working on standards for the mobile web and application programming environments can list for you a complete alphabet soup of acronyms describing the millions of ways in which mobile application development will be better just a few months from now. People working on applications feel like the standardization efforts take way to long and don’t deliver anything that really makes their lives any easier.

I don’t mean to crap all over my own event, but I think it’s very important to hold ourselves to high standards and call out what wasn’t done. Otherwise we’ll all end up cheerleading for another 1999 style failure. I view being an event organizer in The New World Order as a position you get to keep because people are willing to give you what is probably the most valuable thing they have, their time and attention. It’s my job to give them enough information and conversation that they’re willing to give me their attention the next time around. Notice of course that nowhere at all does money or sponsors enter into the primary principal. I’m hoping that whoever tries the next one of these (or if I’m allowed to give it another shot - the next time I do one of these) that we can really push the money and sponsorship into the background and concentrate on making it the best event possible for the people in the audience.

Outside of the phone models available in Japan, almost nothing technology related makes me jelous of people outside the California Bay Area. This post from Tom did however. Is anyone running coding dojos in the Bay Area?

I have the WLAN Connection Manager that Steve mentioned at All About Symbian installed on my E61. I tried using it to connect to a secure access point that I hadn’t created an access point definition for, and a little dialog popped up asking me to enter the key and it created a definition for me. I thought that was nice, but the realized I have no idea if that’s the same as the built in connection manager or not. I created my secure access points while I had firmware 1 installed, under which creating access points with WPA enabled was a real chore. But I got used to that usage, and after firmware 2 just did it the way I knew worked without thinking to retest the more intuitive method.

So this has nothing to do with WLAN Manager really, just the overall concept. Sometimes when you screw something up in a product it doesn’t really mater if you fix it in the next version or not. Once the perception is out there that it’s broken, you have to create something new for no good reason other than to shift user behavior.

Just ran across the online SIS file debugger whythefuckwontmysisfileinstall.com. Pure genius! I think that’s exactly the phrase I’ve used about a dozen times in the past trying to figure out what exactly might have gone wrong with an application install that throws just a generic error. The E61 has actually been pretty good in this respect, I have it set to allow any installs. Not all devices are that nice however.

Three cheers on the whole Mobile 2.0 != AJAX meme. In putting the Mobile 2.0 conf together I’ve heard from a lot of people with new technology who think that because they have something that resembles Web 2.0 practice that makes them Mobile 2.0. I’m hoping they’re in the minority and that’ll just go away soon. Unfortunately every once in a while things have to get nasty though, and I’m the kind of person who would rather be an asshole to a small group of people rather than let a larger community suffer because they’re getting misled. It’s not going to come to that though right?

So if Mobile 2.0 isn’t about the technology what is it about? One of the primary aspects is the user generated content angle I mentioned when I posted about the Mobile Web 2.0 book. But even that term has started to get thrown around like magic pixie dust. Allowing users to make your content for you doesn’t cut it. This is about users communicating and interacting in meaningful and comfortable manner, which you as a service provider support in such a way that it both maximizes the experience the user has while generating something that you can reuse. That’s sustainable, and very very hard to do correctly. Slam together some basic XHTML pages for users to fill in their interests, allow them to put up a picture, claim to be a mobile social networking site, and then spend all the time you should be using to evolve your product shouting from the rooftops how you’re a mobile 2.0 company cause you have user generated content? No, that doesn’t qualify.

That goes double for mobile AJAX, which in every incarnation I’ve seen so far is nothing more than an ECMAScript (ECMAScript being the way geeks pronounce “JavaScript”) programming environment with the rendering done via HTML/CSS. Why is that misleading? Because what everyone thinks when they hear mobile AJAX is that mobile browsers will work to render existing websites built using AJAX. Never the case. Probably won’t be true for years and years - if ever. After learning that “Mobile AJAX” has nothing to do with web AJAX people spend a few hours or days talking about what exactly the differences are. And somehow those people come out the other end thinking that mobile AJAX is a good idea. Frequently saying things like “leveraging existing skillsets” and “highly dynamic user interface” or any of about a dozen other substanceless snippets of standard party line indicating their transformation from a rational thinking being into a brainwashed zombie is nearly complete.

How anyone that’s been paying attention to the evolution of mobile can say that mobile AJAX being something like web AJAX is a benefit is beyond me. Like the way that WML being kinda like HTML made that a raging success? No, I don’t think so. Saying that mobile AJAX is a good idea is putting the cart before the horse. AJAX on the web is a hack, every developer knows it’s a hack. What makes it an elegant and compelling hack is that AJAX based websites work with the browser the user already has installed on their desktop while increasing the usability of the web application. That’s the real “AJAX model” that the mobile world should be following: turning the handset and software the user already has into a more pleasant to use and useful device through clever programming. HTTP, Javascript, XML, DHTML, and CSS may or may not be a part of that. But if you need to get the user to install another application in order to use “Mobile AJAX” you’ve already lost. Installing an application ranks just about even with random crashes as far as user experience goes.

Mobile widgets in general seem to be suffering from the same kind of hype bubble that mobile AJAX has been overtaken with. I’ve lost track of how many mobile widget applications I’ve played with. Some were interesting, most of them were not. The tricky thing about widgets is that some of the ideas are so new within the field as a whole that it’s hard to tell the enabling platforms from the limiting landgrabs. Is the platform allowing you to expose your content to mobile users? Or attempting to lock you into their method of communication and presentation? Some don’t even allow users to create their own widgets, they’re just presentation wrappers for a bunch of small simple functions. Is that even a widget system? I tend to use Widsets as my positive example when it comes to mobile widgets. Why? Cause the basics are built on existing syndication formats used on the web already, creating a new widget based on existing content is a simple operation that a user without programming background can do, and sharing and promoting your widget is given as much attention as creating it. There’s a whole set of questions around widgets that are still hard to define let alone answer. Om and Niall are running a widget focused conference in San Francisco on Nov 6th. Unfortunately the same day as the Mobile 2.0 conference. I’m sure it’s going to be a fantastic discussion and I wish I could be there for it.

Every once in a while someone will say something like “but it’s a consistent platform to build on top of across different handset types.” I can only imagine that they’re joking. Even if it weren’t for the long list of failed unifying platform attempts within mobile, the concept of a platform has changed significantly since the 90s when it comes to Web 2.0. However I haven’t really see the platforms in mobile evolving along the same lines. When we talk about “software above the level of a single device” mobile should be right there at the top of the list. Instead the base software in mobile operates above the level of a single device if you’re a carrier, but is as locked down as ever (or worse than ever in some cases) if you’re anyone else. That just isn’t going to work. The future generations of mobile platforms have to be open source and based on open standards otherwise I think the environment as a whole ends up suffering.