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The (im)Mobility of Web 2.0 Apps
narramissic writes "So many Web 2.0 apps seem like a natural fit for use on mobile phones -- more so, in fact, than the PCs they were written for. Take for example, Google maps or Flickr or any of the myriad social networking sites. Frankly, I wonder why anyone would even want to use them while sitting at a desk. And yet the reality of using those apps on cell phones is solidly disappointing because of the inherent constraints of mobile phones and networks. This article gets deeper into the ups and downs of reworking Web 2.0 apps for use on mobile phones."
Is because I have a huge ass screen and a very fast connection. My phone can't match either of those.
The article seems to carry as a given that layering 2.0 (fill in your favorite definition of what the really is) into the mobile architectures. If I were to consider all of the times I've been frustrated with mobile web experiences, and there have been many, I'd say 99.9% of my frustration has been and continues to be real estate, and screen quality.
Yeah, there may have been a couple of times where I'd wish for faster refresh, but when all is said and done, I'm going crazy trying to establish any kind of gestalt with the mobile web experience. Heck, I'd even say I'd prefer simple text interaction -- not an easy assignment for developers required to sandwich ads into the presentation space.
I know there are some who say we can solve this darned form factor thingy -- I don't think it's soluble. At some point, smaller is just too small, no matter the "quality" of that smallness. Taken to a ridiculous extreme, technology may someday be capable of squeezing a phone, camera, video, music, tv, all onto something the size of the head of a pin. So?
The article mentions "ShoZu", a mobile client that lets mobile users update flickr photos (adding comments)... changing the experience from a 165 second-71.4kb ordeal to a 16 second-3.25kb ordeal. Yeah, the improvement is significant, but I'm not meeting many people who: find adding comments to flickr photos so urgent they MUST do so on their phones; nor are much inclined to do so given the capability.
(personal anecdote: The whole family replaced/upgraded cell phones about four months ago. It was the first time we'd had phones with the builtin cameras -- something I'd never cared about or wanted. However it was intriguing, and fun -- the whole family took pics, swapped pictures and videos, created ringtones, created personalized wallpapers, for one day! Four months later, we all still have the same wall papers we created that day, none of us has sent a single other picture to each other. It's a novelty -- it wears off -- fast!)
The more I see "Web 2.0" (TM) on Slashdot, the more I think it might be real.
Phones, Blackberries, PDAs, and even (my personal favorite) the Nintendo DS are all restricted by a small number of buttons and tiny screen real estate. Ergo, they often need overhauls of their entire front end to accomodate touch-screens, keypads, and voice commands, AND on top of all that they need their networking kicked around a little as well to account for the possiblity of sucky/no service.
The more that laptops and wi-fi become ubiquitous, the less that people will care about using other devices for more than what they WANT to use them for. Yes, having Google Earth and an audio version of Wikipedia would rock. But I don't see it happening.
Nuff said
Because the application is built on Ajax, like many other Web 2.0 services, it pushes data out to the client device in order to speed up future user requests
Does this author understand Ajax or Google Maps *at all*? Why bother reading this tripe?
From TFA:
Browsers on the desktop have evolved along the lines of "do everything" applications, which is why the AJAX/Web 2.0 stuff kind of works in them. Lets face it, if you writing an application from scratch to do match the functionality of Google maps, say, you wouldn't start with a browser. Google maps is impressive because it actually works in a browser!
For Web 2.0 sites, 'lite' custom apps may be just the answer.
Dark Reflection
Web 2.0 can't take off on mobile phones when the you are being raped by the cell phone cell phone companys for data use, unlimited plans that are not unlimited, locked down phones, phones that only work with one company, and more.
It seems to me that the reason that a lot of these apps haven't made their way on to portable platforms (aside from the technical restraints) is simply because many of these services (myspace, facebook, etc) provide a way of mirroring one's real-world friends, acquaintances, &c on the internet and having even more ways of interacting with them. If I'm in the sort of situation where I'm likely to have access to a mobile platform (and not to a computer) odds are that I'm actually hanging out with those friends and acquaintances, and therefore don't need the added layers of communication and community that these sites provide...more than likely, a cellphone with text messaging will be more than sufficient for any "virtual" interactions while I'm in real-world space.
Of course, we're also now reaching a point where these technologies are creating social networks that didn't exist before the technology. I was in college (Zuckerberg's year, actually) when facebook made its debut, and I used it very occasionally as a way to check on my real-world friends' birthdays, cell #s, and so forth. My sister is a freshman now and facebook is an enormous part of "the college experience"; she's "friends" with tons of people she's never even met. This sort of surrogate "virtual" social life can be a lot of fun as a procrastination activity when you're stuck in a computer lab, at the office, or in any sort of setting where you have a computer and should be doing something else, but chances are that if you're running around with a cellphone and nothing else, you've got better things to do with your time anyway.
I left my wallet in El Sigundo!
I've used Google Maps on my phone (Motorola Razr, with TMobile service) and think it's pretty decent. It's about the only third-party application I've ever used on a phone, so I guess I don't have much of a basis for comparison, but it's useful.
The phone's directional buttons work fine to scroll the map or pointer around, and although entering addresses to get directions is a pain, it's not intolerably bad. Overall it was handy enough that I'm definitely going to keep it on my phone.
My main complaint with it has to do with the connection speed -- my phone's internet connection is slow enough (the Razr doesn't do 3G or EVOO or whatever it is that the broadband-over-GSM is called) and that means that zooming the map, which necessatiates a complete reload of the map images, is painful. On a phone with high-speed, it would probably be great.
In the case of a mapping system, the handiness of having it on a phone greatly outweighs the inherent limitations of the medium. I hope that on a phone with GPS capability, that it would do automatic follow-me navigation...that would really be slick, for a free service.
There's a break-even point where it becomes easier to just haul out one's laptop and hook it up to the phone and use the internet that way, which I think is about five minutes. As long as doing it through the phone doesn't take more than five minutes extra, it's fine -- because that's how long it would take me to haul out my laptop and set everything up, and then break it down and put it away when I was finished.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Never mind Web 2.0 apps on my mobile, I'm still waiting for Web 1.0 pages to work half decent.
For better or worse, the Web seems to have settled on a header plus the two or three column layout. On a mobile, unless the site has been optimized (which very few are) you have to scroll down through the header (where every link usually ends up being a seperate line) then through everything on the left and right before you get to the content.
Actually, in the spirit of "picture worth 1000 words," let me SHOW you what the slashdot home page looks like on my BlackBerry 8700;
the first new article is in bold below -- See how far you have to scroll to see it?
Which Web 2.0 definition are they using here, the share-trader's one or the technologist's one?
If it's the first, then it all goes around new business models that (in a not yet fully explained way) explore the networking and first mover advantage effects of online social networking sites to make money.
Now, beyond the fact that mobile phones already support two of the most popular tools for social networks (voice calls and SMS), exactly which new social network features can the online social network sites comunity bring to the mobile phone world that either have already been tried and failed miserable (think picture exchange - MMS) or would not work properly due to the current limitiations of the technology and/or the pricing models for mobile phone usage (think YouTube-mobile)?
From the top of my head, the few uses that i can think of which might be successful are things like allowing the user to navigate his online network of contacts also from his mobile (think a LinkedIn mobile user interface). That might help with the stickiness of the service but might be difficult to moneytise.
If we're going about the technology definition of Web 2.0 that all goes about providing in a browser a user intereface that feels and reacts as one done in a thick client application (basically fast responding and updating what's displayed only where it needs to be updated - thus without a full repaint). That's actually the whole point of AJAX (which is the bastardized mix of technologies people had to came up with in order to make the above mentioned happen under today's standard browser implementations).
This has no application to mobile phones whatsover since neither WML browsers (for WAP) nor miny web-browsers support the necessary standards to allow using of AJAX like techniques.