Joe Sixpack: Strolling the wireless Web

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our new Tuesday feature, Mobile Content and Culture. This weekly e-mail service will cover the most important mobile content news of the week, and will also include contributed columns by big names in the industry, application and service reviews by RCR Wireless News staff, discussions of the wider Internet, enterprise and entertainment industries, and more. Our goal is to give you insights into the business side of things, the technical side of things, and a perspective that is all-too-often overlooked in wireless-the user’s side of things.
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You think Job had it hard? At least he never had to surf the wireless Web.
Industry types and techie fanboys have discovered “secrets” such as transcoding services or Opera’s Mini HTML browser, effectively shrinking the Internet for wireless phones. For most users, though, going off-deck by typing in a URL is like stepping into a hedge maze. While sites like Google.com and Yahoo.com automatically sniff out mobile devices to deliver optimized content, most of the wireless Web presents navigational challenges that would force Magellan to throw up his hands and head home.
So grab your aspirin and pack a lunch: we’re surfing the mobile Internet, and we’re doing it in the shoes of Joe Sixpack with an LG VX8300 from Verizon Wireless.
First stop, the popular community site www.Craigslist.com: The home page is obviously not optimized for mobile; my search for Denver-area content is ultimately unsuccessful. On the plus side, persistent users can make their way to the “casual encounters” section and click on the link, “If you awake hit me for some fun.” So it’s not a total loss.
Next, a couple of personal favorites: MLB.com and Slate.com. Professional baseball’s site-at least, the one you get to at www.mlb.com-is, for all practical matters, unworkable. Too many images overwhelm the phone, and most of the text is completely illegible. Turns out, according to Google Mobile’s search engine, I should have visited wap.mlb.com/index.jsp. Who knew? Or, more importantly, how is anyone supposed to know?
Craigslist offers a mobile site, too: mobile.craigslist.org. Of course, that site is for the city in Alabama. Which complicates matters exponentially.
Same result for Slate.com. While the online magazine offers a mobile-only version-at mobile.slate.com/index.jsp, um, naturally-the traditional site is unwieldy on my handset. My phone gasps for air, twitches and eventually seizes up.
Better results at NYTimes.com; the home page offers eight of the top current headlines with clickable links, and scrolling down returns more headlines divided into categories. A quick check of the URL reveals that the site determined that I was accessing content with a phone and automatically redirected me to the appropriate page. Impressive. Our journey ends on a high note.
While carriers certainly have a vested interest in ironing out the wrinkles on the mobile Internet, it may be the content providers who have the most to lose as the Web goes mobile. Consumers aren’t dumb-if forced to, they’ll eventually learn to use third-party technologies to access the Internet on their phones. Meanwhile, developers will increasingly deliver their own ads while rendering the content of others as they provide a much-needed link in the value chain. Thus, publishers and content owners who force users to jump through hoops on the mobile Web are likely to find developers-transcoding guys, browser vendors and the like-laughing all the way to the bank.