dotMobi

.mobi sites = iPhone web apps = sites for all phones

With Steve Jobs' recent software announcements that will bring the iPhone into direct competition with the Blackberry, I think it's time to give a shout-out to some of the existing .mobi iPhone web apps that are currently featured by Apple.

By this point, everyone likely knows that ZAGAT.mobi is a featured web app for the iPhone as well as being a star of an iPhone commercial.

But there are several others, including marine.mobi (marine weather), mywx.mobi (local weather), kanada.mobi (a mobile travel guide for Canada), suedafrika.mobi (South Africa travel guide), iSchools.mobi (directory of more than 135,000 schools and colleges in the USA) and iTeams.mobi (mobile sports web sites).

What I really like, though, is that -- if you're a developer -- building a great .mobi site means you're also building a great iPhone web app. (And great .mobi sites will work on all phones, not just iPhones.) If you're building cool .mobi sites, you can submit them for consideration as web apps to Apple. And you can use DeviceAtlas to be sure your site works well on the widest number of phones.

As dotMobi predicted when it launched, the iPhone has accelerated interest in the possibilities of the mobile web. A recent statistic noted that 70% of US mobile web browsing traffic is coming directly from iPhones.

If you're a developer, that's a hunk of traffic you'd like coming to your .mobi.

And if you're a user, you'll likely agree that a .mobi is still an optimal experience for the iPhone. While I think it's technically cool that I can shrink and resize standard PC-based web pages on an iPhone or an iPod Touch, it doesn't make the getting of information particularly easy. (Yet another reason why I'm not just a dotMobi employee, I'm a .mobi fan.)

Android and the Open Handset Alliance

Unless you've been down a mine all week, you'll have seen that Google, one of our investors, announced a new mobile software platform this week. It's called Android and the announcement also revealed the creation of the Open Handset Alliance.

Since we at dotMobi also constitute a mobile consortium of sorts, we thought it would be worthwhile talking about it a little. Certainly there are many facets to making the mobile web experience the success it deserves to be, and so the OHA is very welcome to the party.

The most amazing thing about this announcement was that a 34-company deal was kept so secret. But to be honest, after months of speculation, the rest wasn’t as surprising. The project has even kept the Android name, that of company that Google acquired back in 2005 to start the project.

To dotMobi followers, the big question is how well Android will help the growth and acceptance of the mobile web. Certainly it is set, like the iPhone, to increase the industry buzz and interest around the making the internet a truly mobile medium.

It will be important to see how it will be welcomed by the developers and owners of content, and of course, whether it is set to be a platform that also hits mainstream consumer consciousness, as the iPhone has done.

Whilst OHA plays the "Open" card very strongly, the addition of any new platform into the mobile space creates waves of new diversity, which are not necessarily a good thing in the short term. Nothing becomes de-facto overnight.

Of course, in the longer term, if Android becomes a dominant platform, then diversity diminishes and user experience will increase. (Think of the operating system homogeneity in the PC world, and the relative ease that brings to developers). But that would have to come at the expense of other, dominant market players - many of whom are notably absent from the OHA, and to be fair already have fairly open platforms of their own.

While Google has been able to position itself as a leader in the Internet space – despite what many originally thought was coming to that party a bit too late – there's too much at stake in the mobile world for ubiquity and uniformity to happen overnight, or even smoothly. This dynamic of device diversity is a very particular curse for the mobile space. And, incidentally, why we've been working so hard on mitigating it with our device database initiatives.

So the announcement was interesting and positive. We await further progress with great excitement.

Does the iPhone keep dotMobi awake at night?

We've had a number of questions (and seen plenty of commentary) regarding the recent launch of the iPhone and how it might affect us and the mobile web in general

I posted some of initial ideas on this very blog back in January (it feels like an age ago!) - and, despite the fact that I personally don't yet own one :-), I pretty much feel that our original assessment holds up.

In a nutshell: the iPhone changes the way that tastemakers think about their online existence. Interacting with the web, clearly, is no longer a solitary, sedentary and constrained activity.

Now I've personally believed this for a while, so arguably it's no big deal :-)  - the long-term evolution of the web to become a largely mobile (and, by the way, subtly different) medium is inevitable.

With the iPhone, however, this vision starts to become reality for a broad population of users. Not because it's an especially great phone (I believe it is, although not without its flaws). Not because it's doing anything other handsets elsewhere haven't done before, or better. And not even because there's some significance in the way the handset's usage is packaged with sole carriers. (Phew! Coming to Europe soon...)

No, the iPhone is significant simply because mobile access to the web is now, well, cool. No longer are you branded a technogeek or crackberry addict when you pull out your mobile in public and start Twittering or Google/Readering. No. I'm getting down with the pinchy-fingered mobi generation. Could the mobile web really become as de riguer as white headphones?

Maybe. Probably. And if so, how can that be a bad thing for any of us?

(Certainly not a case of "iWhatever"!)

But what does that mean for the .mobi top-level domain extension? Does it mean the proposition is doomed? Why would I ever go to a .mobi site when my shiny new browser does a really admirable job with most (but oh, not all) web pages?

Well of course not. Only if you might naively think that .mobi is only about catering for the constraints of a particular class of browsers. And only if you think that the user's mobile context is not something interesting enough to warrant special attention.

(If you do think that, you've obviously not yet become a mobile web user! Go get yourself an iPhone!)

"Mobile Content for the Mobile Context" is what a .mobi domain is all about. And whilst the iPhone browser removes many of the constraints of today's average mobile browser, there's no Jobsian magic that can suddenly turn the world's web corpus into something contextually compelling by default for mobile-users-at-large.

You've probably heard me give examples of genres of web sites whose constitution would ideally change based on the mobile context. Some are glib perhaps. But think about it. If you've ever accessed a traditional (I'll say sedentary) web site on a mobile device, you'll know exactly what I mean: you nearly always come away just a little dissatisfied: wishing that the search engine or the sites that you used had somehow, let's say, cut to the chase.

"I'm mobile, goddamnit! I don't have time for your sedentary context! When I asked about coffee, I didn't mean I want to read research papers about the growth of Coffea Canephora plants in Brazil! I meant I need caffeine! Now! So where's the nearest cafe?!"

For the seasoned mobile web user, that's the sort of frustration that will immediately sound grimly familiar. Surfing about on regular web pages with my phone is a neat trick, but rarely meets my expectations in terms of a high-demand user. (At least not without a fair degree of persistence and patience on my part, which I always feel is merely my professional obligation to have to tolerate!)

Yes, I can't wait to rotate my iPhone about, and wipe my sweaty fingers around on the screen to zoom, pan and scroll. But that's playing. Pretty soon, the novelty is going to wear off. And I'm going to be left looking for sites and services that are so exciting that I'm compelled to use my expensive new toy to access them, rather than waiting a few hours until I am sedentary again ;-)

So the main reason that I'm excited about the iPhone is that these frustrations and challenges are going to be exposed to a far larger, trend-driven propulation. And with the size, motivation and influence of the Apple cult (both on the user and developer sides of the equation), the iPhone's greatest legacy may well be the catalysm of the world's site owners and developers doing something about it.

With the mobile web's historical challenges of cost, speed, browser (and fashion!) removed from the equation, I hope we'll now see an explosion of interesting, innovative, mobile-centric services burgeoning. The "iPhone mobile web aftermarket" you might even call it.

Will this be a movement that understands the value of the .mobi domain? A way of letting site owners state their mobile credentials? A way of letting the user indicate their mobile context by default? A way of large brands providing competive and differentiating services?

Well, of course we hope so. Certainly nothing about the iPhone breaks that logic.

Ultimately, the TLD's context-centric proposition is as strong as ever - and with spectacular phones like the iPhone continuing the mobile web's unstoppable aggrandizement, it seems to me that these are all winds blowing in the same direction.

I've never been more excited about the future.

Mobile Browsing: Why isn't the customer in the driver's seat?

We've always pointed out that with over 3,000 types of devices in the market at any one time, it's very hard to build content that works across a good cross-section. 

But why get so technical as that?  If you have switched or upgraded mobile phones in the last 12 months--I have used 4--you know that initially you spend the first day or so, just "fiddling" with your phone, trying to re-learn functions that by now should be innate. 

Why? Because nothing is standardized.  On the same model phone you can have the browser buried 4-5 clicks away from the "start" menu or just as an option off of the pre-programmed bookmarks, depending on what operator you have and what they negotiated with the device manufacturer.  So you re-learn how to use the phone from scratch. 

Last February at 3GSM it was quite entertaining to see people "fiddle" with the new phones just being introduced and praise some functions (e.g., "Nice camera!" or "It's got a built-in MP3 player!") and damn the others (e.g. "Where is the browser?" and "What is this button for?").  Hardly anyone predicts that the Internet will grow via the PC paradigm; nearly everyone agrees the future is mobile. 

So I ask you - "Whatever happened to making things easier for us on the hardware itself?"  Why not make it easier to find and access the browser... or a search function for that matter? 

How about voice guided navigation? (Yes....I know kinks have to be worked out.  But if we put the man on the moon in the 60's, I have faith we can tinker with voice recognition in the 21st century to make it better). 

Did you know there are companies that are founded simply to help content providers navigate and test the  anarchy of the device/navigation/operator paradigm? 

Why is it that what the operators think we ought to see (pre-programmed bookmarks, "walled gardens", etc.) is right there, while functions and apps that could make our lives a lot easier are so much harder to find?  What happened to consumer choice and convenience driving these decisions?  Why is it that the latest and most lucrative deals (say, between operators and application providers) dictate what we ought to see and use?  Is consumer choice and ease of use such a radical concept after all?

I hope not....

What does the iPhone mean for dotMobi?

A quick word of introduction: I'm James Pearce, the new dotMobi CTO. I've been working with the mobile web for over seven years now, and I'm excited about this. 2007 feels like it really could be the year that the mobile web starts to build up momentum.

A number of people have discussed the impact of Apple's iPhone announcement on the purpose of the .mobi top-level domain. For my first post, I thought it would be an intriguing topic to tackle.

In short, the iPhone can only be good for all of us - the .mobi domain included.

Firstly, the launch. Steve Jobs is the ultimate technology showman, and with his keynote, he showed that he can bring glamour, excitement, and design credibility - not to mention sheer consumer glee - to the mobile phone industry. The column inches the iPhone has garnered in a few days must surely have been a wake up call to every other handset manufacturer. Many of them have brands that you would hardly call weak, and yet the buzz from this one manufacturer about this one device has been enviable in almost all respects.

The device itself is certainly exciting, and exactly the sort of gadget you'd expect from Apple. I won't run through the lengthy specifications here ;-) but it's clearly designed with more than plain voice telephony in mind. The device appears to have a very balanced approach to its three main functions: phone, internet device and wide-screen iPod. (Indeed Jobs teased his audience by suggesting he was going to be announcing three separate products).

For all us mobile web fans, one area of particular interest is the browser. The phone runs a limited variant of Apple's desktop operating system, OS X, and hence the iPhone will be shipped with the platform's Safari browser. Jobs really played this up at the show, showing how rich web sites could be accessed, and positioning the browser's support for AJAX: "we've got Google Maps!".

But wait a second... Safari is based on the WebKit browser project. And so is the S60 browser. And the S60 browser appears on many Symbian handsets today, and has done for almost a year. Can it really be true that Steve Jobs' fully-fledged-browser-on-a-phone story is not so innovative after all?

Well, yes. I've been a fan of the S60 browser (on the Nokia N80 phone) since last spring. I've been able to access rich, complex web sites on it. And yes, I've been using Google Maps too! So a glib answer to the question about how the iPhone affects dotMobi is... that it affects it in exactly the same way as many of today's phones do.

And that way, I believe, is positive.

How so? Well, if one believes that dotMobi is only concerned about ensuring bijou web pages for limited devices, then my position may be hard to understand. Why access a lightweight .mobi site when your browser (S60, Safari, whatever) supports arbitrary, heavy-weight .com sites? (Although there's currently an easy answer to that too - at least if you're not on a flat-rate data tariff :-) )

But here's the thing. I believe .mobi is about so much more than just small, compliant markup that will reliably work on all handsets. It's also about the context of mobility: it's about a web user inferring that the provider of the site has thought through what he or she, on the move, wants to do on that site.

Or to put it another way, with an acid test: if I was on the move, was running Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2 on my phone, and I knew that the site I want has both .com and .mobi addresses, which would I choose?

It's easy: device and browser regardless, I still want to go to the site that targets my particular context (a human on the move). And that would be the .mobi address.

Which might suggest that the iPhone makes no difference to dotMobi! But that's not true either. Don't forget the marketing power of the Apple brand - coupled with the extent to which many anticipate they will be promoting the iPhone as a mobile web device. That will undoubtedly give the meme of accessing data services from a mobile greater and greater mass market acceptance. Everyone who thought they were simply upgrading their iPod (or just upgraded their mobile subscription to get an elegant new phone) will in fact be signing up to Apple's vision of mobile web access.

Suddenly the mobile web will be default. Suddenly the mobile web will be accessible. Suddenly the mobile web will be cool.

And for that reason alone, the iPhone is great for dotMobi - and of course great for the mobile web as a whole.