Comments on: The Mobile Web is Dead

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:06:41 +0000

Good. The WEB is now a mobile cloud and everything is somewhere in it. As we develop, design and create the new WEB, our government is designing a method of control that will censor, regulate and eventually totally control it. Then what? Anyone care?

By: Miron Lulic

Miron Lulic — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:54:57 +0000

I actually wrote a related post on my blog about the “mobile webvs apps debate” the day before you wrote this blog: http://mironlulic.com/index.php/2009/10/19/mobile-2-0-the-apps-vs-mobile-web-debate/

While I agree that we’ve come to demand a comparable user experience on mobile devices, I totally disagree that the mobile web is dead.

While many devices can now render websites developed for PC users, the user experience is terrible. Websites developed for mobile browsers or “mobile web” sites are actually growing rapidly in number because they are designed to address these issues.

Because of the form factor of hand held devices, these are a necessary evil and will continue to exist for at least another 5 years until the W3C figures out some web development standards that will allow sites to be cross platform compatible.

I believe that we are going to see a continual blurring of the traditional and mobile ‘webs’ over the next few years with a rapid expansion of the made for mobile web in general.

By: Chuck Sacco

Chuck Sacco — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:15:14 +0000

>>> We expect, no we demand, that the web we access on the go is the same web we access at our main computers.

Your need is valid, but your expectation that a different medium will satisfy it in exactly the same way is not.

The experience should not be the same and the content should not be the same. That’s because it’s not just about PC-bound experience and content, it’s also about the context of how the user is experiencing the content. What, where, and when of the consumer experience become critical parts of the mobile web equation.

So it’s not about being the same, it’s about taking the relevant parts of the traditional web experience, adding in the important elements of context, and baking a new paradigm for consumers on the mobile web.

By: mobiThinking

mobiThinking — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:31:58 +0000

Mobile Web isn’t just about having a mobile website – though that is an important part –, it’s about thinking about how you serve the mobile customer.
Any marketer that looks at their own PC-orientated website on a cell-phone – no matter how smart the phone (and remember even in developed countries only a fraction of people have smartphones) – will soon see how unpleasant it is for their customers. Slow to load…scroll this way, scroll that… can’t find what you want… give up.
When you want news on your phone, do you access a web-orientated news site, when there’s a mobile-friendly one from the competition?
In fact, you’d be pushed to find a big news organization hasn’t got an extensive mobile site. Would they bother if people were happy to surf PC sites on a mobile? No. As soon as they got a whiff of the visitor numbers, download and signup statistics, revenues and publicity that their competitors were getting and they dived in headfirst.
Mobile Web is about thinking about what mobile visitors want from your site – they won’t be browsing aimlessly, they will want something specific – the weather, the news, the location of a shop, the time the film starts, a restaurant review, book a hotel room, find out when a delivery is due – mobile sites make it easy.
It’s also about taking advantage of mobile media’s unique attributes to make your business more relevant. Tailor what you offer to your customer’s location. Offer useful SMS alerts; competitions; promotions, such as mobile vouchers; downloads – whether that’s apps, games, ringtones, screensavers or content that they can send to a friend for Valentine’s Day etc. And if you still think mobile is boring after all that, then take a look at what you can do with augmented reality for example.
And considering that number of cell-phones subscribers globally dwarfs the number of PCs (and is growing at an exponential rate), how long will it be before those people, who like shouting, start shouting the “PC Web is dead”?
If any of that sounds interesting, try http://www.mobithinking.com – it’s packed with educational materials to help companies serve their mobile customers.

By: Crayon Monitor

Crayon Monitor — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 06:37:49 +0000

As a manager of a software company making enterprise grade management software, a few years back I could certainly see the web starting to become as omnipresent as one could hope it might be, and the bottleneck at that time was predominantly in the low connectivity of devices. However, not all commercially useful software can be reduced to a series of playing-card-sized screens with push button touch screen input, which is what iPhones and all the other hardware now provide.

My view is that once upon a time there was a subset of the web that was written in parallel, especially to be “mobile”, that is, tiny pages, but as more and larger units come into the mainstream, with full-time affordable connections to the web, the distinction is rapidly becoming pointless. This means that in whatever way users want to connect to the web, there are more and more ways that will suit them, and more and more varied hardware and ways of using software that will do it for them. And the expectations of users about what the web means will drive software (not just web pages, fully functional interfaces) in new directions as well. So there may not be a mobile web, but the web sure as heck is mobile…

By: Dale Larson

Dale Larson — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:23:38 +0000

The mobile web is dead in that it never took off — mobile-only or mobile-optimized pages represent a tiny fraction of all pages on the web.

The mobile web is dead as a separate web.

The mobile web needs to grow vitally in awareness of all web developers. Fortunately, almost everything you can do to make web design better on mobile devices improves the desktop experience as well!

Designers and developers should be more concerned with compatibility with the iPhone version of Safari than with IE6 compatibility. Eliminate or minimize use of Flash. Keep things simple. Use fewer words. Require less input. Allow more scrolling and fewer clicks. Consider the implications of location and time. And so on.

If anything, it is the desktop-only web that is dead (or, at least, dying quickly).
Long live the mobile web!

By: turn.self.off

turn.self.off — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:20:53 +0000

the trick would be to divorce data from presentation, and stop making assumptions about what IO options the user has available.

look at opera mini, it can do its magic thanks to being told what screen size the phone in use has…

similarly, if one where to id the browser as more then a dead string of mostly legacy text, one could apply a fair bit more logic at the server end, and gain a page that would fit the device in use, no matter screen size, pixel density or input devices available (oh how i hate drop down menus on web pages).

By: Avram Piltch

Avram Piltch — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:00:49 +0000

You raise some great points. At every site I’ve worked for there’s always been this debate: do we invest significant resources in developing a mobile site, when the experience is never good enough and current gen smart phones are getting better at displaying full Web pages?

I agree with you that mobile sites you die a painful death, but there’s just one problem: screen resolution. Unless you have a smart phone with at least 1024 x 600 resolution, you’re going to be doing a lot of horizontal scrolling or zooming in / out on most of today’s top sites. This is why mobile apps have become so popular even though many of them duplicate functionality you can get for free on the Web: they’re made to fit a phone’s unique screen size and UI.

By: mikecane

mikecane — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:20:37 +0000

Oh and you missed one killer line at that conference (which I could only see about 15 minutes of before my crap PC clogged):

“You design devices differently for people who are out in the world instead of sitting at a desktop.”

The web will be designed differently for devices that are using touchscreens instead of stupid mice.

By: mikecane

mikecane — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:18:44 +0000

>>>Then mobile technology started advancing at a rapid pace, and the devices and the platforms they used got really good.

Translation: APPLE finally made the mobile web actually possible.

But you’re missing the point that the web itself is dead.

Haven’t you seen how many sites have morphed to accommodate the iPhone? And some news sites are now apps?

The iTablet is going to usher in a huge new rethinking of the web — along with touchscreens. All this scrolling crap we’ve been putting up with will look as stupid as the ASCII-based systems of the early 1980s do today.

http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/touch-will-change-everything/

By: Igor Faletski

Igor Faletski — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:06:43 +0000

Great read. James, I actually blogged nearly the same opinion as you (with the same title) a year ago.

Since then I changed my mind – now I believe that the mobile web is not dead.

What’s changed is the definition of the term. Before, the “mobile web” was essentially a walled garden (mobile social networks, mobile search engines, dotmobi etc) that was promoted as the only place for Internet-enabled mobiles to go to.

Now, for the reasons that you mention, “full” websites are expected to be mobile-friendly. But 99% are not. Today, the mobile web is defined as the subset of the full Web that is mobile-friendly. Hopefully it will grow, fueled by inspirational examples of Facebook, GMail and Flickr. At Mobify, we’re working hard to give every web publisher and designer the tools to be a part of this movement.

Thanks!

By: animatio

animatio — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:19:52 +0000

what a hollow, shallow statement. THE WEB is n-dimensional by definition. for everybody. some travel aound it, some across it, some in it. the only thing that varies is the way different individuals make usage of THE NET and the character of devices used to do so. there are n’t different nets.

By: James Kendrick

James Kendrick — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:40:17 +0000

The attendees were Silicon Valley folks in the web business, hence the focus of a lot of the discussion.

By: ARJWright

ARJWright — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:33:47 +0000

Constrianing the view of the “mobile web” to what appears in social networks and within browsers is quite limiting.

For the mobile web, its the ability to divorce the location and time constrants from the PC web experience that makes it what it is. Its the fact that applications are “browsers,” not just a W3C-befitting application. Its the intersection of those things socially, with those things personally, that just happens to use similar protocols and different constraints than the PC web that makes the mobile web what it is.

Its not dead at all; its the opinion that the mobile web should equal the PC web that’s dead. And such a thing shouldn’t be resurrected with devices, applications, or analysts.

By: cybertactix

cybertactix — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:36:51 +0000

James;

I completely agree, there is no “moble web”, only “The Web” and I just want better tools (and the same experience) no matter where I access it from whereever I am, no matter what.

With regard to yesterdays webcast, I only caught part of it but there seemed to be a lot of focus on data mining all this information that social networks and the “mobile web” are creating. My question is, is this the end user perspective or is this the attempt to find “the next big thing” and monetize it?