Fling Media

Thursday, October 11, 2007

The Demise of Mobile???

A very interesting conversation is occurring on the Mobile Monday London mailing list that I think echos the sentiment of many of those in the web community in the days and months following the release of the iPhone.

To paraphrase: As mobile devices get better at rendering the regular Web as we know it, like the iPhone, doesn’t the need to create mobile specific content disappear?

Honestly this is a question I’ve largely ignored addressing on the Blue Flavor site for several months, not out of apathy, just because I don’t usually have the time to respond to the deluge of comments that typically comes from pondering such a heated and controversial topic.

But when Jamie, a Mobile Monday London member, posted the topic “The Demise of Mobile???” this week I was compelled to chime in with my two cents. I spent so much time thinking about my response, I wanted to share it here… ominously bringing the debate to our own shores.

Jamie asked:

This may not be everybody’s view but during last nights [Mobile Monday] presentation I picked up the feeling from one [person] in particular that the way forward for the mobile web is to do away with WAP and just have the Internet in HTML on a mobile device so that the user will have a rich experience. I believe this is already possible with the iPhone, iPod Touch, some HTC devices and that Nokia tablet thing. It is clearly evident that my mobile technical knowledge is far from competent but the marketing and advertising side is very important and relevant to me. Should mobile go down this route of having the internet without WAP, would we not see the demise of the mobile marketing agencies, billing service providers, ad serving companies, err basically everything!!!??

I think this question is analogous to the great “One Web” versus “Mobile Web” debate. Will the “regular Web,” of content designed for desktops eventually replace WAP or mobile optimized content? (leaving the technological differences of protocols out of this)

Sure. Hopefully around the same time I get my long over promised flying car ;)

The classic “One Web” argument is to assume that the world wide web should be device agnostic. Markup should be free of device specific formatting and the viewing device should be able to render markup intelligently within the constraints of the device.

(As a point of clarification, there is much confusion over the official W3C One Web statement and the principle I’ve outlined above however many people have chosen to adopt it regardless, therefore the ongoing debate.)

While a worthy technological ideal, I believe the classic One Web argument provides little benefit to how real people use mobile content today. And I believe this will be the case for many years to come.

The problem isn’t the capabilities of the device, or standards, or even operators, as much as we’d like to blame them for being the root of all evil. The problem is context.

Content viewed on a mobile device has an entirely different context than that of the desktop web, a physical context often dealing with their mobility. Mobile content can and should be relevant to the users physical location, to their task at hand. It should address the fact they are viewing the content on a smaller device, over constrained bandwidth, or maybe while driving a car (no one ever does that right?). Or even do something simple like initiating a phone call (I know! how old school!).

The desktop web has no meaningful reason to do this today, so context is largely ignored from the creation of web standards to the creation of web content. Therefore I believe as long as the user has multiple contexts in which they can apply personal relevance to content, there will always be a strong need to serve multiple versions of content, the cursed concept of “multiple Webs.”

I apologize for the soapbox, but no… I believe as mobile devices become more advanced, the need for “multiple Webs” will increase, not decrease. As devices become smarter at detecting physical context it is entirely possible that there will be a version of content for every context. Besides, if there can be more than one Universe, why can’t there be more than one Web?

One day there may be a practical internationally adopted standard to markup content that will allow us to have one source of content and allow for the user to adapt it to many different contexts and applications on the fly. Maybe this will evolve from something like XSLT or WALL, but until tools are created or adopted by the majority of content producers that make it easier and less costly than creating a new site specific to a context, I think it unlikely.

For now I’m betting that I will get my flying car first. I’m more than happy to keep “breaking” the Web in order to put the users needs before technology until is does.

Finally, sorry about the shameless plug, but I truly hope this debate will continue at the upcoming Mobile 2.0 and the Future of Mobile London conferences (I’m involved with both). I think this is an important conversation, I hope to make sure it continues. Thank you Jamie for starting it.

There… I said it!

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