Archive for October, 2006

Three cheers on the whole Mobile 2.0 != AJAX meme. In putting the Mobile 2.0 conf together I’ve heard from a lot of people with new technology who think that because they have something that resembles Web 2.0 practice that makes them Mobile 2.0. I’m hoping they’re in the minority and that’ll just go away soon. Unfortunately every once in a while things have to get nasty though, and I’m the kind of person who would rather be an asshole to a small group of people rather than let a larger community suffer because they’re getting misled. It’s not going to come to that though right?

So if Mobile 2.0 isn’t about the technology what is it about? One of the primary aspects is the user generated content angle I mentioned when I posted about the Mobile Web 2.0 book. But even that term has started to get thrown around like magic pixie dust. Allowing users to make your content for you doesn’t cut it. This is about users communicating and interacting in meaningful and comfortable manner, which you as a service provider support in such a way that it both maximizes the experience the user has while generating something that you can reuse. That’s sustainable, and very very hard to do correctly. Slam together some basic XHTML pages for users to fill in their interests, allow them to put up a picture, claim to be a mobile social networking site, and then spend all the time you should be using to evolve your product shouting from the rooftops how you’re a mobile 2.0 company cause you have user generated content? No, that doesn’t qualify.

That goes double for mobile AJAX, which in every incarnation I’ve seen so far is nothing more than an ECMAScript (ECMAScript being the way geeks pronounce “JavaScript”) programming environment with the rendering done via HTML/CSS. Why is that misleading? Because what everyone thinks when they hear mobile AJAX is that mobile browsers will work to render existing websites built using AJAX. Never the case. Probably won’t be true for years and years – if ever. After learning that “Mobile AJAX” has nothing to do with web AJAX people spend a few hours or days talking about what exactly the differences are. And somehow those people come out the other end thinking that mobile AJAX is a good idea. Frequently saying things like “leveraging existing skillsets” and “highly dynamic user interface” or any of about a dozen other substanceless snippets of standard party line indicating their transformation from a rational thinking being into a brainwashed zombie is nearly complete.

How anyone that’s been paying attention to the evolution of mobile can say that mobile AJAX being something like web AJAX is a benefit is beyond me. Like the way that WML being kinda like HTML made that a raging success? No, I don’t think so. Saying that mobile AJAX is a good idea is putting the cart before the horse. AJAX on the web is a hack, every developer knows it’s a hack. What makes it an elegant and compelling hack is that AJAX based websites work with the browser the user already has installed on their desktop while increasing the usability of the web application. That’s the real “AJAX model” that the mobile world should be following: turning the handset and software the user already has into a more pleasant to use and useful device through clever programming. HTTP, Javascript, XML, DHTML, and CSS may or may not be a part of that. But if you need to get the user to install another application in order to use “Mobile AJAX” you’ve already lost. Installing an application ranks just about even with random crashes as far as user experience goes.

Mobile widgets in general seem to be suffering from the same kind of hype bubble that mobile AJAX has been overtaken with. I’ve lost track of how many mobile widget applications I’ve played with. Some were interesting, most of them were not. The tricky thing about widgets is that some of the ideas are so new within the field as a whole that it’s hard to tell the enabling platforms from the limiting landgrabs. Is the platform allowing you to expose your content to mobile users? Or attempting to lock you into their method of communication and presentation? Some don’t even allow users to create their own widgets, they’re just presentation wrappers for a bunch of small simple functions. Is that even a widget system? I tend to use Widsets as my positive example when it comes to mobile widgets. Why? Cause the basics are built on existing syndication formats used on the web already, creating a new widget based on existing content is a simple operation that a user without programming background can do, and sharing and promoting your widget is given as much attention as creating it. There’s a whole set of questions around widgets that are still hard to define let alone answer. Om and Niall are running a widget focused conference in San Francisco on Nov 6th. Unfortunately the same day as the Mobile 2.0 conference. I’m sure it’s going to be a fantastic discussion and I wish I could be there for it.

Every once in a while someone will say something like “but it’s a consistent platform to build on top of across different handset types.” I can only imagine that they’re joking. Even if it weren’t for the long list of failed unifying platform attempts within mobile, the concept of a platform has changed significantly since the 90s when it comes to Web 2.0. However I haven’t really see the platforms in mobile evolving along the same lines. When we talk about “software above the level of a single device” mobile should be right there at the top of the list. Instead the base software in mobile operates above the level of a single device if you’re a carrier, but is as locked down as ever (or worse than ever in some cases) if you’re anyone else. That just isn’t going to work. The future generations of mobile platforms have to be open source and based on open standards otherwise I think the environment as a whole ends up suffering.

I went to the October meeting of the Homebrew Mobile Phone Club. How cool is it that something like that exists?

Matt Ettus’ presentation on the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) was awesome. He has been working on the GNU Software Radio project for a while, and was working on a device that he could hook up to his PC to use with the software. Eventually his hobby turned into a business, and the device that was meant for hobbiest experiments has turned into a testing a prototyping platform for professionals and shaddowy government agencies working on software defined radio projects.

Matt gave an excellent description of software defined radio, which I’m sure I would completely flub if I tried to reproduce it word for word. But it was basically that software defined radio is not an exact thing you can point at, but a continuum of radio technology. One side being completely static hardware designs, and blending into what is called “software defined radio”, where more and more of the functions migrate from hardware components into software functions.

Of course there are practical limitations to exactly how much spectrum you can cover with a software defined radio. As you want to cover more the cost goes up, or the precision decreases or the power consumption goes up. So any practical current software defined radio isn’t going to be completely generic, it’ll cover (perhaps large) swaths of spectrum, but it won’t be able to tune absolutely anything. I don’t really understand the raw modulation and power and encoding sides of this whole wireless gig all that well, so I’m always happy to hear more human parsable statements about cutting edge wireless stuff.

The USRP that Matt sells is open source hardware. The specs and schematics are all available online, so if you wanted to source and build one yourself you could. If you wanted to build it and sell it you could. You could even make them and give them away for free. However if you distributed the stuff based on his designs you would have to distribute information about your changes, just like what the GPL does for source code. I didn’t ask about hookups… if you used the design for his USRP and included it in something you made would you have to distribute or make available design specs? People work around that bit of the GPL by designing runtime interfaces instead of direct linking of binaries. What would be the equivalent in the hardware world? Does hooking to the same generic bus count? What kinds of bus would count as firewalling the IP of a design and which wouldn’t? Wishbone for instance frequently hooks together cores on the same chip, that seems like it might count more as direct linking than bus separation. Hmm.. that was just thinking aloud, I’m tempted to edit that out of the post… Nah. The open source hardware question has to come out at some point.. and many now people will have heard it here first ;-)

But for us mere mortals he sells completed boards. The units consist of the base, which communicates raw samples to your PC via a USB2 interface and plugin daughterboards capable of receiving and/or sending on particular chunks of spectrum. With something like a GNU Radio application looked up to the device you could record whole chunks of spectrum raw and decode them in software. For instance you could record all of FM radio at the same time and record all the channels to hard disk as audio. Neat. The GNU Radio part provides generic functions common to demodulating data (signal processing blocks) and some framework to orchestrate things like timing and parallelism. I’ve never used it, but it looked pretty cool. I’m really tempted to get me one of these things to play with.

The Sun folks where there talking about OpenSPARC as well. That was a bit less up my alley because I just can’t see getting a FPGA development kit and synthesis tools that would support something like a sparc core and interesting peripherals any time soon. Not to mention that I have almost no idea at all how something like that works out practically. Not that it normally stops me, but still, there’s only about 28 hours in a day (if you count the parts that can be parallelized effectively through a software agent). Hardware design unfortunately does not slot in there well.

What I did find interesting was why something like the OpenSPARC was being discussed at a mobile phone club. Cause the entire Niagara effort is about maximizing performance per watt for web applications. And maximizing performance per watt is definitely something that mobile apps need to do as well. So maybe there’s a chance for some crossover. Apparently a few teams have already taken the open designs that Sun has put out and started crunching them down for practical use in much smaller applications.
Niagra = best performance for watt for web apps – interesting summary of purpose.

Looks like discussion has started on the WML Programming Yahoo group about the Global Authoring Practices document that Luca Passani has been working on. I know of Luca because of the WURFL project, and had invited him to come up to the Mobile 2.0 event. He pointed me to GAP, which wasn’t public at the time, but unfortunately we had filled up all the speaking slots and I couldn’t offer him a chance to present. He hasn’t been interested in attending if he can’t speak. I can understand that, most conferences are a broadcast only medium. But we’re really trying to do something different with this conference and want to see the divergent viewpoints represented so that we can get a real conversation going.

I have Luca in my Skype list now and I’ve been trying to catch him to convince him to come. That hasn’t worked out unfortunately, I just haven’t managed to sync up with him. So if some of the MoMo attendees from Openwave can wander over and whisper sweet nothings to Luca and get him to come up for the day, it would be most appreciated! There’s some great insight in what he’s pulled together and I would love to have him at the event. So consider this my public begging. Luca, very sorry I didn’t ping you sooner in putting the speaker list together. Even though we can’t give you a speaking slot, I would very much like to have you there.

About the document itself, it has a much more practical focus than a lot of the other stuff I’ve read recently in getting myself more familiar with the mobile web. Take the section on usability for example, the “Beware of Forms” tips are fantastic – redefining forms as menus is possible in a lot of cases. In wandering to lots of mobile sites over the last month and trying them from different devices (or even different browsers on the same device) the enhanced navigation and forms behavior really is frusteratingly different. Especially for WML sites, where options and actions can end up effectively hidden under second level menus.

I think I’m probably in the group of people that Luca is objecting to with this document. I’m a “one web” person, an advocate of evolving the current split fixed/mobile set of web standards and practices into one environment. Some people mistake that as meaning that I think that accessing the web from a mobile device and your PC should be the same thing, but that’s definitely not what I mean by it. There are particular restrictions, situations, and motivations that exist for a mobile user that normally don’t come up for a PC user. I’m not advocating paving over the whole thing and trying to submerge the differences between the two environments. What I mean is that I think that people are going to want to be able to access the same kinds of “stuff” on their mobile as they do on their PC. Of course they want to interact with it in a different manner, of course the circumstances are different.

The latest round of online activity is all about giving me (the user) more control over my content and my friends and my communication. How can we transform the practice of making web applications such that new crops of web applications are mobile by default? That’s what I mean by “one web”. Practically, I really don’t care if thats done using a single set of HTML with different stylesheets, server side device adaptation, or little elves who live in carrier networks and can rewrite web markup languages inline in realtime. There are positives and negatives to each, and because there’s no clear winner or roadmap for navigating the alternatives the average web developer can’t be bothered to care. That’s the problem I would like to fix.

We’re having the October meeting of Mobile Monday Silicon Valley next week, Oct 9th. Telephia and M:Metrics are going to be presenting. Should be very interesting, I keep hearing about the fantastic numbers that both companies have with respect to mobile usage in the US. Now I have some perspective of my own (one of the fringe benefits of being a service provider that sees about 10 million mobile page requests a day in realtime) I’m going to be really curious about how these numbers match up to what we’ve seen. Thanks to Jordy for hooking us up with some sweet San Mateo space at Digital Chocolate. I’m actually moving to an office in San Mateo very soon as well, so this should make for a good trial run.