Just catching up on some reading this evening and I saw Tom Hume’s post about the WURFL survey. Very cool! WURFL is a fantastic tool, I use it for a few different projects. Even hacked on it some to get it humming for some of the abnormal workloads we see at AdMob. I have no idea how long it’s been up there, but there’s a pointer to some info about the WURFL evolution up at the top of the WURFL project homepage. Check it out, interesting stuff in there. Modularization in particular, and keying off device info besides the user agent.
Mike Rowehl
I've been working in mobile for a long time, and on internet service scalability even longer. I'm currently working on Churn Labs with some friends, hacking on a bunch of interesting mobile projects. Drop me a line if you're interested.
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Mike,
While WURFL is a solution that can provide a lot of info about mobile devices and is important to services that sell/provide mobile downloads, wouldn’t you agree that it’s a bit overkill for general mobile phone and portable device detection on Websites? Most sites aren’t selling downloads for mobiles, but they can benefit by being on the mobile Web.
The way I’m seeing the Mobile Web and device detection, is that the majory of the need ‘will’ be for basic Websites that simply want to point a site visitor to the correct version of their Website.
Running WURFL just to redirect phones on every Website that is considering a mobile site sounds like a lot of overhead, additional processing, coding, etc.
I bring this up because it is a topic I’ve been considering for many months, after the silly .mobi domains came into being and I had a blog comment from the general manager of .mobi. They seem to feel that all one needs is a .mobi domain – and your mobile problems are are solved.
I’ve been developing a very simple solution based on studying mobile and portable user agents which so far identifies maybe 90% of the phones out there just using a short function I wrote that uses a regular expression to locate the phones. After studying user agent strings, I found there were around 20 words which show up at least once per UA string.
With this, I’m going to release a simple, easy to use solution that will allow anyone to launch a mobile site and redirect mobile/portable traffic to the mobile version of their site.
While working on it, I thought it might be a good idea to contact you about AdMob. Possibly there’s some way we can cross promote. For example, my mobile template system could include the basic code for displaying your ads – with info about signing up, etc – so the ad service would be built right into the templates. You have my email address, let’s talk :) I’m on skype just send a msg to: gideonmarken
I have a site up for the code/product – it will be shareware with licenses available for commercial use. I should have the site public in 2 weeks.
Have a good one – and glad to hear things are going well with AdMob :)
Certainly, it is a lot of overhead for a web developer looking to make a mobile version of their site. And long term I’m really looking toward a unification of mobile and fixed web development directly, without having to develop two versions (I don’t care if a single dev version is split into two versions when deployed, it’s only important that the developer develop one version). But for now the WURFL system works the best from what I’ve seen. And for AdMob in particular we need to pull some deeper capability info than just “is this a mobile”. However for the average web developer looking to make a mobile version a simple redirector function would be fantastic. And I’m definitely interested in talking about building AdMob hooks into the templating system.
Hi, have you seen this:
http://www.passani.it/switcher/
?