Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Tom picked out one particularly juicy tidbit from Novarra, and James Pearce points to the dotMobi response to the issue in his comments. It’s great! I might start using it as my example of why participating in W3C is useless, it’s a stellar performance.

I realise that what I am proposing puts the onus on servers that have more than one representation to do something that they don’t today, and I realize also that I am suggesting that transcoding proxies can modify the user agent string.

Yea, that’s not going to work. What’s really amazing is the signal to noise ratio. So many emails and they can really be summarized in just a few points:

1. Mobile developers, we don’t care what you think.
2. We’re changing the user agent anyway.
3. We’re hiding the ways to request the original user agent behind a convoluted process so that we can call new developers dumb when they don’t understand it. Cause the way to solve problems that are difficult is to make them more complex. It makes us feel good about ourselves.
4. We still don’t care what you think.

Go W3C! Well done.

Charles Stross is going to be in the Bay Area on Friday Oct 12th! In Mountain View he’s going to be at Google for both signing and a reading, and the in the evening up in San Francisco. Fantastic!! I would really like to catch the reading. Hopefully I don’t burst into flames when I set foot on the Google campus.

Tim Bray has a post arguing against flat rate mobile data plans from carriers. I don’t agree with the really low cost for data part, but his overall suggestions are something that’s come up before when we talk about the future for mobile carriers. He lays out the steps wonderfully:

1. Discontinue all flat-rate mobile data plans.
2. Offer a-la-carte data at a price that seems obscenely, ridiculously, low.
3. Radically open up the network. Let anyone connect anything to it. Sell phones that make it really easy to download apps from anywhere and run them.
4. Build a developer ecosystem. Make it effortless to get in. Build a hot-new-apps social network; maybe in alliance with one of the big existing social nets.
5. Don’t ask developers for any money. But sell the use of your billing system at a really attractive rate, so people can sign up for apps and have it billed to their phone plan. Do it at a scale that an app can charge a dime a month and still make money on scale.
6. Duck and cover, because the explosion of creativity and new business models will cause some casualties.

I see where he’s going with the “once the carrier has your money they have no incentive” side of the argument, but I don’t think data figures in there. His point about billing infrastructure is the real key. That should be the point of incentive, not driving more data traffic. You need to build the network and run it at capacity so that you can provide the other services, which is in my opinion where the real value should lie.

The Vodafone v. Mobile Web fight continues to rage on. This time with Techcrunch UK picking up the thread from Luca, and with Vodafone continuing to deny the fact that there could ever be anything wrong with what they’re doing. I don’t know if they really don’t see the issue, or if they just decided to tow a party line and figure out how far they can take it. Personally, I don’t see any more how they could not understand the issue. There must be something deeper in there that they’re not talking about yet, for which breaking the user agent model of adaptation is necessary.

If you’re a mobile publisher definitely take the time to weigh in on this one. Vodafone appears to be willing to just blithely ignore and deny the issue, but I have to assume that once enough people make enough noise they’re going to have to drop the facade and really fix the problem. Or own up to the issue and start, you know, an actual discussion. Instead of just popping up and spouting the “we have already fixed the services that have problems” non sequitur.

I’ve swapped from Gregarious to OMGWTFBBQ a while ago, mostly because it rocks on the N800 when compared to the other stuff I’ve tried. And of course cause I named it, so I think it has a fantastic name. Give it a shot if you’re looking for a nice simple reliable multi-device RSS reader you can use from a phone, tablet, and desktop web browser.

I’m about to hop on a plane to New Hampshire. Not a well planned trip, not really all that welcome, but it needs to be done. So just to make sure I could just zip thru what I needed, I cleared my email inbox down to about 40 messages a wanted access to on the road. A nice small inbox is necessary when doing email from the ‘executive model’ Nokia E61. Otherwise it gets confused and generally crashes, sometimes hangs.

Good thing too! Cause as I arrived I noticed that I had written down both the fake flight info for my flight and the real info (one of those ‘operated by’ flights) but forgot to note which was which. Never fear, I have that message right in the creamy middle of my 40 message inbox.

So I fire up the messenger client and wait. And wait. And wait. Listen to music for a little while. And then bing! Messages synced. Except the message I’m looking for isn’t there. Almost none of the messages are. Just a bunch of garbage I thought I deleted. Weird, I must have screwed up and not actually comitted the inbox changes? Could be.

So I fire up the N800 running the open source Claws email program. It’s a lot more tolerant. It can deal with my screw up. And I connect it via bluetooth to the E61. Get that? Cause its important. Using the network connection from the phone, so theres no network disparity.

Claws starts up in literally seconds, shows me my inbox list, which does indeed have the 40 items I expect it to. Including my flight info. Yay! Man I wish I could get a Maemo device with a cellular interface. Theres just no beating what an open community can do. I hope Nokia is learning from whats happening.

Google announced recently that they’re going to start running advertisements from their existing pool of Adwords ads against mobile pages by transcoding the pages for advertisers so that they’re usable from mobile devices. I can see it being a really touchy subject, Omar has his take and Russ has his take. There are probably some fundamental differences that might never come together on this one.

Me, I see it as the difference between inviting everyone to a dinner party and offering them the use of the pool if they want to go in. And inviting everyone to a dinner party and having the bouncers grab everyone and toss them in the pool half way through the main course. I mean who doesn’t like a good pool party, right? You would have to be insane. But getting unceremoniously tossed in is still bound to make a few people mad, there are just nicer ways to get the same thing done. At least they’re not charging for the clicks until November 19th. I guess that’s kinda like tossing folks into the shallow end rather than the deep end. I’m just imagining the support nightmare some of the advertisers are headed into:

• “I’m having trouble registering on your site.”
• - No problem, are you using Windows?
• “No, I’m on Sprint.”
• - What kind of browser are you using?
• “I don’t know, whatever the one on my phone is.”
• - What kind of phone do you have?
• “The one that’s 75 dollars with a two year contract, it’s got a green swirl on it.”

Sure you don’t have to pay for the clicks, but I could see this being far from a “free” experiment. I do hope I’m wrong though, if they can kick open the door to a whole boatload of mobile advertisers and get additional users in, I’ll be a happy camper no matter what. Even if it makes my day job harder. I’m just a glutton for punishment like that.

Unfortunately I seem to have made it through the part of recovering where I sleep all the time and gotten to the part where I’m awake but not able to do stuff. I think I liked the part where I was asleep better. I was slightly less aware of what I was missing before. Fortunately the blog client on the N800 works well for when I can’t keep myself upright any more.

The IM integration is pretty great, it’s mainly what got me started using the device again. And for email and browsing it certainly rocks. Russ and I had a voice chat between two devices and that worked out much better than I expected it to. Still I can’t help but think that there’s some usage that I’m missing still that would make the device killer. Maybe it’s cause I’m a geek, but I end up thinking about things like a personal dashboard or client for the IM bots that cranks up the verbosity and provides a nice interface for digesting the streams. I thought personal agents were supposed to be mainstream by now, why do I have to keep writing my own stuff?

There’s a great thread going on in BetaVine including some real old-hands of the mobile web discussing Vodafone transforming the user agent presented in requests coming out of their transcoding systems. Much as I absolutely love Daniel, I have to disagree with his comment that getting involved in the W3C is a great way to influence stuff like this. I signed up for a bunch of the W3C lists when I started at AdMob, and the subscriptions lasted variously between 2 weeks and about 6 months, but in every single case resulted at best in a slight education on some esoteric topic. About as much education as if I would have picked up if I read a few pages in Wikipedia on the topic.

Overall I really think W3C has floated away from the real concerns of practitioners in the field. The first round of W3C stuff was great, because they came into a working environment and tried to consolidate and unify it. However the process has broken down now that they’re trying to expand usage and introduce new policies and mechanisms. The way to drive the evolution now is to build stuff, release it, get feedback, and iterate. Trying to sit everyone down and decide on what should be built next I have very little hope for. The open source model, that’s been working pretty well for the stuff that I’ve seen working.

Hello, my name is Mike Rowehl, and I’m an Amazon junkie. I’m signed up for Prime, and I think 1-click ordering is probably the single worst danger to my bank account. Lately I’ve been running across some really interesting stuff, I’ll share (and I won’t even make them Amazon affiliate links, just so that no one suspects any underhanded motives):

• Swarm Intelligence
• Super Crunchers
• Everything Is Miscellaneous
• Linux Kernel Development (2nd Edition)
• Convergence Culture
• Ambient Findability

You ended up ordering something didn’t you? See what I mean!! And that’s not even all of them, just the ones at the top of the list from the last few weeks.