I bet I am not the only one wondering what Nokia was going to announce yesterday… In addition to the N97, Nokia Messaging was the big news. Put short, Nokia Messaging is enabling a bunch of IM-like services on the phone. In my mind this is an important change in the traditional mind pattern device manufacturers, and MNOs, have had until the iPhone.
This movement has accelerated quickly since the launch of iPhone. As I see it, it is about acknowledging the mobile Internet and that the Internet is the backbone of the majority of messaging, social and communication services. I mean, why should device manufacturers or mobile operators re-invent the wheel by creating proprietary IM services (or any kind of service) that only work on some subset of handsets, or that are not portable between operators? The value chain surrounding the mobile operators is also heading this direction, at least in some parts of the world where "openness" has been around for a while.
And the end user? Well, instead of putting up with whatever the operator or device allows, the user is, for the first time, getting a taste of freedom of choice. Probably the choice will be based on what’s known from earlier experiences, probably from the PC (phase 1), and how this choice works out in real life (phase 2). Then our duty as mobile developers is to do what we can to make sure the user chooses OUR services by facilitating phase 2 of the choosing process. This means that device optimisation, distribution, user experience and openness are becoming more and more important. Yes, my experience so far with these kind of services is that the need for device adaptation is getting more advanced and more important with the introduction of devices such as the iPhone. Its not only about adapting markup, javascript and CSS to the device any more, its also about adapting to interaction models. But still, we are closing in on the "One Web" many speak of.
Further it is easy for developers (and marketeers) to forget that the mobile phone is first and foremost a social device made for communicating with friends; the current killer apps are voice and SMS. In addition to this, we know that the mobile phone is a powerful content creator and distributor, it knows where your are located, it knows who your friends are, information can be pushed to it from many sources (WAP push, SMS, email) and its always online. I wont dare to try a one-line definition of "web 2.0" here, but isn’t this what it’s all about? To me, the mobile phone seems to be the missing link required to get any "web 2.0" application or service to work! Desktop web presence is simply not enough. Facebook is a easy to use example. Huge on web, the iPhone app is on the top-10 list in AppStore, and facebook is number 2 on yahoo mobile search. In my mind, any Internet project aiming to be a "web 2.0 service" or "socal service" must implement the mobile channel as well in order to use the words "web 2.0", "social" in conjunction with the service. To quote Gartner’s Mobile Web Trends 2007 to 2011
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"A mobile Web strategy is essential for any organization with customer-facing systems or relationships."
I was quite pleasantly surprised to see how fast that business is "harvested from the Apple tree". The number of examples of enabling mobile Internet services for mobile is steadily increasing. Also in the newspaper business there is a trend going towards CMS systems with built in mobile support at the sacrifice of classic feed based solutions. So I guess we all agree on that the future is bright and that 2009 will be the year of the mobile 🙂
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