Recap – Mobile Mondays – Browsers: Driving the Web, or Driven by the Web?

We’ve all heard the news: Apple’s 3G iPhone (to be released next week) will again alter the mobile landscape with its low(er) price, rich features, robust platform, and powerful network. The iPhone is the most visible (and the most consumer-friendly) sign of change in the mobile landscape, but industry-wide, there are many interesting initiatives and advances are taking place. This past Monday, Mobile Monday Boston brought together a panel of mobile web thought leaders to discuss these changes, as well as the hidden challenges and opportunities for mobile content and technology developers.

Orange’s Ed Mitukiewicz, the panel moderator, discussed the overall need to define “the web” as it pertains to the mobile experience: is it the full experience, just shrunk down? Is it collection of clever, focused apps following some new paradigm? There is also an immediate need to make the mobile web experience more accessible to users now that it is becoming more technically viable (in that we are beginning to see a more robust network, better devices, and richer services). He stressed, however, that mobile web browsing still accounts for less than 1% of all web traffic despite this increased viability as well as stronger initiatives (such as .mobi and the W3C’s web initiative). Questions were laid out to the panel: How does the the mobile web differ from the web as a whole (both developmentally and experientially)? What can technology give us (and when)? How can companies make money in this space?

Keith Waters, Director of Research at Orange Labs in Boston touched upon the idea that mobile technologies are becoming “flat-earth” technologies: it has a global, enabling impact (for more on this concept, be sure to read Tomi Ahonen’s thoughts on mobile as the “7th mass media”). This global spread, however, faces challenges that could hinder more widespread usable adoption, such as developing for a fragmented array of devices and a lack of mobile-ready content (to the user, content is interesting, not the browser).

Mike Phillips, co-founder of Vlingo, approached the questions from a software developer’s standpoint: in the mobile space there are certainly infrastructure issues, but the real challenge will be to create meaningful user interfaces for devices (and browser developers will need to work closely with software vendors to find usable solutions).

Dave Carson, technical lead on Google’s Android platform project, discussed how the influx of more and more platforms and the quicker deployment times associated with developing web applications is lowering the bar significantly for developers.

Franklin Davis from Nokia took a more broad view, noting that for the majority of the three billion mobile users on the planet, mobile browsing will be the way they get information. How do we frame the traditional browser/technology/application/development issues when we are facing such a large user group who have limited (or no) prior web experience and expectations.

Finally, Mozilla‘s Brad Lassey briefly discussed how mobile Firefox (Fennec) will further increase the richness of available applications through its implementation of features found in the desktop world, like standards compliance and extensions support.

Overall, the panel agreed on several points:

• Content is king, but context (for example, location, presence) is a key differentiator between mobile devices and desktops. Users don’t need (or necessarily want) everything, just the right information at the right time, and they seem to be willing to accept a lower fidelity experience if it means quicker access to data.
• Mobile is “always-on,” always carried, and is a very personal medium. People trust their phones, so the development community has to be cautious exposing personal data to applications.
• Widgets are developing into a powerful way to deliver targeted (and contextual) data to mobile users. Using web standards and existing technologies, widgets can be relatively easy to develop and can run virtually anywhere. Mozilla is currently working to bring Prism to mobile as a way to quickly create widgets from web pages. The panel noted that even as widgets are currently plagued by distribution and discovery problems (the right widget needs to be available to the user at the right time), perhaps these applications will follow the current model of simple (and ubiquitous) RSS discovery.
• Accessibility and the mobile web have a lot in common. Making the web more accessible and following standards will be beneficial as you move to mobile devices. Soon, too, most people will view content only via mobile and will never see the web as we traditionally do (in the desktop environment).

But challenges (and opportunities for innovation) exist:

• What will the new information display paradigm be? Will the browser be viewed as an application itself, or a holder for smaller, targeted applications? How can content be developed and displayed across various modalities (touch, keyboard, voice, etc)? When will developers be able to fully take advantage of mobile device capabilities?
• How can content creators and site managers migrate to mobile (especially in the current environment)? The vast majority of web content (long-tail content) has not been designed for mobile consumption, so we will be living with content adaptation for some time. The current feeling is that you must either have a very simple site that can be adapted to a mobile experience or go the route of large web properties (like the NYTimes) and completely rewrite the experience and tailor it for mobile.
• How will advertising adapt to the mobile space? Will we see mobile banner ads, or will there be more exciting and contextual opportunities? How will users react to advertisements in an already limited mobile experience (especially as data transmission is not free)?

The panel concluded that we’re only beginning to see some radical changes in the mobile web space. Developers are beginning to be freed from traditional carrier limitations, and barriers to application development and deployment are falling. Applications are finally starting to take advantage of the unique features inherent in mobile devices. Most importantly, a global population of users are growing more savvy and consuming mobile content and media like never before.