Mozilla’s Joey allows users to create their own mobile deck

Mozilla Corp. is looking to Joey to help untangle the wireless Web.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based developer is toying with a service that allows users of its Firefox browser to store content on a remote server. Firefox users can save pages on the server, which doubles as a transcoding technology, and can access the mobile-optimized pages from their handsets.
Transcoding technology is nothing new to surfers of the mobile Internet, of course. For more than a year Google Inc. has formatted Web pages for users performing searches on their handsets, and a newcomer named Mowser offers a similar service. Opera Software ASA is gaining impressive traction with Mini, a downloadable Java-enabled browser that customizes Internet content for mobile, and Greenlight Wireless Corp. was one of the first players on the field with Skweezer, a Web-based application.
But even the most advanced browsers and transcoding services have yet to make the mobile information superhighway a smooth surface, said Doug Turner, Mozilla’s lead engineer of mobile technology.
“Even with a very good browser-the Opera Mini or the Nokia S60, for instance-it’s still a pain in the butt to get to the content,” Turner said. “You have to load a whole bunch of pages to get what you’re looking for. If you’re standing in line at Starbucks and want to get to that content, it doesn’t really work.”
Unlike some other offerings, then, Joey allows consumers to create a kind of personalized deck. Users can capture specific portions of pages-a Major League scoreboard, say, or a stock ticker-which are updated every time the content is accessed remotely. Mozilla is working on a Java-based downloadable mobile application, negating the need for a browser, and there are plans to add RSS support to the service.
A few thousand people are using the service, Turner estimated.
“What we wanted to do was put the user back in control” of the mobile Internet, he said. “The idea is to take the pieces (of the Internet) that are most interesting to you and syndicate them and allow you to access them from your phone.”
Joey’s most important asset, though, may be its open source nature. Like Firefox, Joey allows users to access the code and tweak the software in an effort to help evolve the technology.
While developers and early adopters may be quick to experiment with Joey, wireless carriers could be less than thrilled with the service. Most operators are likely to continue to make it difficult for users to venture into the wireless Web alone, preferring to keep them close to their content partners on the carrier’s own portal.
“It’s going to be really tough for them to specifically block us unless they want to block everybody,” Turner predicted. “It looks like operators are tending toward a more conservative, sandbox-style approach; they’re making it more annoying for the user (to go off-deck). That’s such the wrong direction the industry needs to go in.”
Mozilla recently launched a new version of Minimo, a traditional phone browser. And Turner stresses that Joey, which launched two weeks ago, is still in the testing stage. But the offering has already generated a buzz among tech enthusiasts, and Mozilla’s substantial development community could help move Joey from beta to market very quickly.
“A lot of startups are doing all kinds of crazy things in the space-crazy as in good, and crazy as it not-so-good,” Turner observed. “That’s what we wanted to do under Mozilla Labs, is to take those risks, throw something at the wall. If it sticks, great. We’ll build a huge community around it.”