Or so it says here. And whatever it means 🙂
The question was “In your opinion, what parts of the Web need to be improved or fixed in order for the Web of today to evolve into the Web of the future?”. And I said…Â
Fundamentally this question assumes that the Web can be consciously improved or fixed at all! In fact the Web on any given day is really just the result the motivations of the people and organizations that have created content and services on, and via, it.
We believe that the evolution of the Web to become mobile is absolutely inevitable. In the future we will look back at ourselves in the early years of the 21st century and laugh that we used to have to sit at a lonely PC screen to enjoy our on-line existence. That will seem as antiquated and quaint as the idea of the 1950s family gathering around a box radio in their sitting room to listen to music.
The Web will lose the shackles of immobility and start to meld itself ever seamlessly around our human life, which of course, is rarely static for very long.
The Web’s technology will not need to evolve very much to start working well on mobile handsets (which have increasingly reliable browsers); however it needs to be used in a sympathetic way. There’s no point going crazy and showing off with bloated heavyweight content, not because of network speed, but because users on the move are by definition impatient and want to cut to the chase.
That makes mobile Web development quite a cathartic experience: in fact there’s a certain Zen in creating a streamlined on-line service that is primarily designed for mobile.
But ultimately the successful content and services of the coming years will be those that not only take the mobile browser’s behaviour into consideration, but which are primarily aimed at users in the mobile context. Not surprisingly, users rarely want to have pieces of a large Web presence squeezed down to their mobile phone—they rather want a compelling and beautifully designed web that suits their mobile lifestyle.
So my answer to your question is this: for the mobile Web (which is the Web of the future), Web developers should think different.
Anyway. I am not a fan of that stock photo 🙂