Mobilizing the mobile Web

Google's stake in the game
Matt Waddell, product manager with Google’s mobile team, said the iPhone symbolizes a melding of three important aspects that are making the mobile Web happen: “a phone with a capable Web browser (Safari, in the iPhone’s case), a device with an increased amount of attention to the user’s experience and flatter and flatter data plans.

“As these three factions become more prominent in devices overall, we expect to see an increased amount of mobile Web usage overall,” he said.

Google has a stake in that happening with its Android mobile software platform, endorsed by many key players in the tech industry, and so far by mobile phone companies T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel.

Android is a free and “open” platform for cell phones that could make the mobile Web easier for software developers to maneuver by essentially have one development standard.

“As a developer, you want to make your application and your experience available to as many users as you possible can,” Waddell said.

“The current state of affairs is that you invest a lot of time and resources optimizing your application for each individual mobile platform — BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and others.” (Msnbc.com is a Microsoft-NBC Universal joint venture.)

There are other indications that the mobile Web is morphing quickly.

Last week, at CTIA-The Wireless Association’s annual trade show in Las Vegas, Yahoo unveiled its OneSearch program, which will let consumers use voice commands for mobile search. Amazon launched a new service, TextBuyIt, which lets cell phone users text-message, using the phone’s keypad, to search and buy products from Amazon.

From lighter to more utilitarian uses
In its recent study, M:Metrics said that while the mobile market grew 9.5 percent from January 2007 to January 2008, use of the mobile Web grew 11.5 percent.

Doesn’t sound like a lot, but “when we look at what people are doing, we see double-digit growth in the number of people using their mobile Web browser to get traffic information, restaurant and movie information, stock quotes, maps, sports, weather,” said Donovan of M:Metrics.

“I believe what that shows us is that given a good (mobile Web) browsing experience, people want to depend on the Internet as a utility to help their lifestyles.

“A couple of years ago, what were people doing on the mobile Web? Maybe they were looking at sports scores or horoscopes — ‘snacking distraction,’ " he said.

“There wasn’t yet an infrastructure, or the right devices there to help them really improve their moment-to-moment life, whether it was figuring out how to get from Point A to Point B, whether there was going to be traffic along the way, or a restaurant where they’d want to stop in and eat. I think that is an interesting shift.”

Waddell, of Google, said, “It was once assumed that the mobile Web was very much a second-class citizen, relative to the Web on the desktop.

“As we see the quality of mobile Web browsers increase — and they are, at a rapid clip — the mobile Web will cease to be a second-class citizen. And the consumer is going to start to equate a high-quality device with a high-quality Web browser.

“It will become a standard part of the mobile experience, in the same way that people just expect to be able to browse a rich Web on the desktop.”

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