2006 has been an exciting year to be involved with the mobile web and mobile data in general. I want to highlight four major developments this past year which I believe are going to have a profound and positive effect on the quality of the mobile web experience for years to come.
- Mobile web advertising comes of age. I credit this almost entirely to AdMob, the startup that took the Google AdSense model and applied it to mobile. Seems like a simple thing to do but it sure caught on. Before 2006, it was rare to see an ad on a mobile site, AdMob opened the flood gates and now it's just the opposite - mobile sites without ads are the exception. What's so great about that? Simply this, advertising makes the mobile web economically viable. Before AdMob, the off-portal mobile web was dying, there was no way to pay the bills except perhaps with porn and gambling. Only the carriers made money with the mobile web and carriers don't innovate. AdMob did an end run around the carriers making it possible for startups to monetize innovation.
- The First "Killer" Mobile Apps I know this is a controversial call but for me at least they have arrived. There are three mobile sites and applications (two from the newly "evil" Google) that have become an indispensable part of my life. They are:
- The Gmail for Mobile Application - simply the fastest and easiest way to read email on a mainstream phone - it runs rings around any mobile web based solution. Unlike other Java and non-Blackberry native email applications on phones, everything you do with mail on the phone - sending, deleting, archiving and tagging - synchronizes back to the Gmail servers and shows up in web based Gmail as well.
- Google Reader Mobile - I've been a Bloglines user for a long time but I've
switched to the latest revision of Google Reader and it was the mobile version (image) that prompted me to switch. Bloglines mobile is good but has long had some annoying bugs. The "keep unread" feature only works about a third of the time. Unread items get marked as read and disappear when you follow a link in a post. The clincher was Bloglines forcing all external links through the Skweezer transcoder without anyway to get to the original site - even if it was a mobile site or if you were using a full web browser like Opera Mini. In comparison, Google's mobile reader transcodes linked pages but offers you a link to to the original page as well. Other pluses for Google Mobile are providing the choice of reading a River of News or picking and choosing from among your feeds and items and Google's resizing of images to fit your browser.
- Mologogo, a Java application that uses my phone's GPS to show me where I am on a zoomable map. The latest beta version adds local search so I can see the nearest Starbucks, atm or sushi bar plotted on the map in relation to my location - awesome. There's a good overview with screenshots of Mologogo at the MAKE:Blog
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posted by Dennis Bournique
December 30, 2006 @ 11:16 pm
7 View Comments
