Traditional Web sites are often lost in translation on mobile phones. So developers are hoping to bridge the disconnect between wireless phones and the Internet by building a “middle Web.”
The emergence of Apple Inc.’s iPhone has spawned a flurry of activity by developers looking to put their best face forward on the revolutionary device. Everyone from Google Inc. to Weather.com to the Food Network have built a site specifically for the iPhone. AdMob has released a special ad unit for the popular handset, and Harper-Collins Publishers has launched a pilot program to deliver excerpts of new titles directly to iPhone users.
And that kind of activity is sure to ramp up as the wave of “iPhone killers” comes to market. HTC, LG Electronics Co., Research In Motion Ltd. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. are just a few of the major players looking to slow Apple’s momentum in wireless by luring customers with high-end, Web-friendly phones that deliver PC-like experiences. Those phones – with their bigger screens and cutting-edge technologies – will spur Web developers who’ve long been stifled by the small displays and limited processing power of feature phones.
“Essentially, the belief is that we will be seeing many more iPhone-like devices that are capable of browsing the full Web in all of its glory (minus flash glory for now) with things like javascript, DHTML, and full ajax support,” AdMob CEO Omar Hamoui posted on the company’s blog. “In general, as this trend continues, the richness and depth of mobile services will expand dramatically by making it possible for companies and individuals to build and extend their services with the tools and technologies they already know.”
Can’t we all just get along?
The middle Web, as it has been dubbed, certainly addresses the problems that continue to plague the transcoding space. While consumer-facing Web-to-mobile technologies offered by Mowser and Google sometimes deliver stripped-down versions of sites that are easily consumable on a phone, they often fail to compact information adequately – essentially choking phones that can’t handle the data – or seem to put sites through a blender, making the content unreadable.
But some believe the trend could further fragment a mobile Internet that already is in splinters. MySpace’s device-specific version ruffled the feathers of some of its iPhone-toting users, many of whom took to the site’s message boards to voice their displeasure. “MySpace mobile for the iPhone is horrible,” one member wrote. “It’s slower and has lots of error(s). Is there any way to get back to the regular MySpace?”
And just as creating device-specific sites requires the buildout of multiple Internet destinations – increasing the number of things that can go wrong – the trend may not be viable in the long run. Unlike PCs – which generally conform to certain physical specifications and are limited to a handful of browsers – the mobile world teems with variables. There are hundreds of handset models and networks in dozens of languages running an increasing number of mobile Web browsers. While device-detection technology can effectively deliver users to an appropriately designed landing page, the question becomes: How many device-specific landing pages will developers really build?
Spanning the globe
“The BBC in London is committed to making mobile content, but they care only about phones in the U.K., so that’s the extent of their reach,” said Jayanthi Rangarajan, CEO of Novarra Inc., a developer of technology that formats Web content for phones. “In America the BBC has a customer base, but they can’t reach them. With globalization, the bigger provider of content you are, the more you need reach with mobile phones. It is simply unscalable to try to know all the handsets. So what happens is you make the lowest common denominator (site) you can, which defeats the purpose.
“In every market there are only 60 or 70 mobile-only sites,” Rangarajan claimed. “That is the truth nobody faces.”
Rangarajan may underestimate the number of mobile Internet sites in existence, of course, as there are dozens of Web destinations for the iPhone alone. But more importantly, the “one Web for all devices” fails to address the fact that users behave differently on the Internet depending on what kind of hardware they’re using – a crucial factor when it comes to the advertising dollars that fuel the Internet. Click-to-call ads are ideal for mobile phones, as Hamoui points out, but almost pointless on a PC. And users are accustomed to filling out a dozen fields on Amazon.com to make a purchase from their computers, but few are willing to tackle that challenge with a 12-key pad or even a touchscreen.
“Despite the fact that the technology will port easily, the interface remains different, and the value an advertiser can get from a mobile user vs. a PC user is also very different,” Hamoui noted. “We’ll see how it all plays out, but from our perspective the rise of the middle Web is inevitable at this point; it will be very interesting to see what this means for mobile in general.”
