Bad wave: Surfing the wireless Web a real bummer

If checking out the Internet on a PC can be called surfing, browsing the wireless Web is more akin to hunting snipe in a briar patch: it’s arduous, painful, and sure to leave you disappointed.
The fixed-line Internet has evolved to offer a remarkably standardized and simple user experience. URLs are usually intuitively named and limited to a handful of domains-often according to genre, such as .edu for schools and .org for nonprofit agencies. And surfers who aren’t sure what they’re looking for can turn to any of several finely tuned search engines to get within a click or two of where they want to go.
For mobile users, though, the Web can be a frightening place. Wireless URLs have no standardized format, so while Google’s mobile site is simply google.com/m, Newsweek’s offering includes a staggering 44 characters. Other wireless-specific sites insert the terms “WAP” or “mobile” somewhere in the mix, while still others simply drop the prefix www.
So consumers who take the time to triple-type familiar online addresses are often left not just with cramped fingers, but also with sites that are designed for computers, not phones. Pages can be ill-formatted to the point of uselessness, and data-heavy transmissions can overload a handset to the point of seizure.
And in these early days of mobile data, a rotten user experience could shackle usage of the wireless Web in its infancy, according to Savka Andic, a research associate with London’s Wireless World Forum.
“Lack of a standard format is definitely a major problem” Andic wrote via e-mail. “Technologists within the mobile industry are notorious for getting caught up in their own inventions and forgetting their most valuable resource: consumers. If the consumer experience is not up to par, then operators and other stakeholders have fundamentally failed.”
Mobile Top Level Domain Ltd., a Dublin, Ireland-based outfit, has established the suffix .mobi to address such concerns. The group has registered more than 400,000 wireless URLs and claims an impressive list of backers including L.M. Ericsson, the GSM Association, Microsoft Corp. and Vodafone plc.
But the company has drawn a tempest of scorn from critics who claim the .mobi suffix is unnecessary. The effort has been described as a “money grab” that will serve only to confuse consumers by forcing them to input different URLs depending on the type of device they’re using.
Developers such as Opera Software ASA and Novarra Inc. have produced mobile browsers that effectively format Internet content for mobile phones, delivering stripped-down Web sites for the smaller platform. And Google Inc., Skweezer and others provide transcoding technology that also customizes Web sites for mobile.
Most U.S. mobile users aren’t aware that they can download Opera’s Java-compatible mobile browser from the company’s Web site, though, and consumers must access sites through Google’s search service to take advantage of the Internet behemoth’s transcoding software.
Instead, owners of online content should build mobile-specific sites but use technology that connects the device to the content that was created for it, said Boris Fridman, CEO of Crisp Wireless, a New York-based startup that powers mobile Internet sites for the Washington Post, Paramount Pictures and others. Crisp and others offer software that allows consumers to input the same URL on either a phone or PC, but be directed to the appropriate site based on the platform. Not only does the technology result in a better user experience, it eliminates the need to type in dozens of characters for mobile-specific sites.
“Consumers don’t remember mobile URLs,” said Fridman. “They don’t really know that they need a special URL, and businesses don’t want to educate consumers about it.”
Surprisingly, though, some of the biggest media companies in the country have yet to make it easy to access their content by typing in a Web site. A wireless trip to www.BET.com-the online destination for one of the most mobile-savvy media outlets in the United States-results in an unreadable display. And visiting www.VerizonWireless.com from a mobile phone overwhelms a mid-priced feature phone. Both companies, of course, have built mobile-friendly sites, but wireless users who type in the familiar URLs sometimes aren’t automatically delivered to the WAP destinations.
One of the problems, according to Andic, is that content owners must make their wares usable across a host of networks and devices. And everyone involved in the value chain should put themselves in their consumers’ shoes as they stroll through the wireless Web.
“The best way to address the problem is to change the way we see the problem, and ask better questions about why consumers are not using the mobile Web,” Andic wrote. “This means taking a consumer standpoint when addressing the shortfall in the mobile product uptake. . As long as the industry sees consumers as passive ‘end users’ stuck at the end of the chain and does not value their feedback, it will not make any advances in its understanding of why they are not using certain products.”