Hey! Free party! Mobile Monday members invited. (Better brush up some RoR to keep the small talk going).
But wow. I’m fascinated by http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ - if the BBC can pioneer like this, then anyone should be able to. I love the idea of all these underlying data sources exposing APIs to a broad community of application developers.
It’s just like an operating system. Is http://code.google.com/ the new MSDN?
In case there was any doubt that there’s something underway (that may or may not be called ‘Mobile Web 2.0′), observe the enthusiasm and buzz converyed via this new W3C aggregator.
It’s interesting in two ways. It reminds us all that the W3C Mobile Web Initiative group is healthy and well underway. It also shows that W3C has more to offer than standards and recommendations. This is about trying to seed a community.
And it mostly seems to be down to the efforts of Dominique Hazael-Massieux, who is to be applauded.
[Edited from comments made on the dotMobi blog]
As I understand it, .mobi is not as much about the fact a site is to be used on a mobile phone as it is to signify that the application or content is going to be suitable for usage in the context of mobility.
ilovetacos.com might be a corporate site with a rich, browsable ordering service.
ilovetacos.mobi, on the other hand, might be an interface designed to get you some tacos (with as few keypresses and dollars of data usage as possible), while you’re out and about.
I would have thought “finding out about tacos at leisure” is a totally different use case to “I’m on the move. Get me tacos now!”
It’s one web. Just two use cases. Right?
Additionally, if the browsers are able to do spectacular gymnastics to get full web sites running on a phone, then content developers may be lulled into a false sense of mobile comfort.
In fact, I would hazard thar ‘mobile applications’ are encapsulated by a philosophy far broader than fiddling about with markup and media-ruled stylesheets (on the server or on the client).
Could any browser turn a corporate taco web site into a location-based delivery service?
One final way of looking at this: if you could run a full version of FF2 or IE7 on your phone, might there not still be a good reason to visit the .mobi domain first (as you walk down the street)?
I’ve worked for Argogroup for the last five years or so, and we’ve been focussed on trying to help mobile data serices take off – by helping operators and content providers improve quality.
We did that using ‘active test’ techniques. Basically you simulate real users accessing your services and see what experience they would have had. It’s a great improvement (or complement) to using passive techniques to measure data traffic within the network to deduce quality.
But what’s next? I think even ‘active test’ needs to evolve. After all, how can you truly represent millions of users synthetically?
So I’m thinking a lot about this. “Quality of Service v2.0″ I’m calling it. Basically, why not use the power of the ‘crowd’ (your users) to measure your quality for you?
Instead of benchmarking your web site, or mobile application, you’d ‘crowdmark’ it.
Or to put it in grandiose terms, imagine every terminal, every web browser, every laptop, every phone, hooked up to a vast, virtual, peer-to-peer instrumentation space. Every application or service comes with an embedded quality deduction tool - that not only measures its own performance, but encourages the user to record their own experience, and so shares and collaborates in measuring the performance of this and other applications.
If I am using an application like Placeopedia, imagine if my session was be able to give something back to the underlying ’Internet Operating System’ services that it uses. Record the user-experience, for example, and share it back through the mashed-up APIs, to Google maps, Digital Globe, NAVTEQ, Wikipedia, Yahoo broadband, BT Wifi etc etc. My simple behaviour has added a small drop to the QoS data ocean. But that’s an essence of web2.0: act locally, interact globally.
And it’s not just about tracking protocol-level quality. Talk to the user, ask them how they are doing. Ask them to rate what they see. Let them tag their user experience!
Well, I can safely say it means nothing!
I registered it back in about 2002, when I was intrigued by a number of things happening in the Semantic Web space. That’s a world full of ‘triples’. I also like my film. And for some reason a familiar kids cartoon network popped into my head. Before I knew it, I had a name.
Actually, I rather wish I’d gone for ‘Semantic Cinema’. Might still do 
Well I’ve had this domain for years, and never really did anything productive enough with it (except use it as my catch-all email domain).
Right now I’m feeling motivated to do something with it. Primarily a blog, I think, but also somewhere to put my Google Reader shares!
I’ve been impressed over the last few months with the collective enthusiasm around properly bootstrapping the mobile web. I’ve worked in this area since about 1997 (when the Unwired Planet products started crossing the pond) so it would be wonderful if it turns out that it took only 10 years for it to finally reach some sort of fruition.
I’m no environmentalist, and certainly far from green. But I’m scared about climate change. Rather than resorting to the common euphemism of ‘save the planet’ (which can probably look after itself), I’d go for ‘save the species’ (meaning ours). Bad times ahead.
And of course the web. It’s become a cliche to say ‘I hate buzzwords, but let’s talk about web2.0′. I think it’s great to unashamedly talk in terms of buzzwords! It’s that ‘collective enthusiasm’ thing again.
Probably also a good place to chuck links to a variety of other projects I’ve got underway.
Enjoy.
