Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

I’m starting to see more and more folks use the handheld media type link to indicate when a mobile optimized version of their content is available. Excellent! However, as normally described it’s meant to point to the mobile version of a page from the desktop version. What do you do if you have only mobile pages? If your pages are WML or XHTML-MP it’s somewhat easy for a proxy to figure out you have content meant for mobiles, but that behavior really isn’t standardized. How do you indicate to the world that your site is meant for mobile?

If what you’re looking to do is inform indexes and content adaption services that you already optimized your page for handheld use you can use the same header right in your mobile content. You have to spoof a mobile user agent to see it from your desktop, but MoFuse is doing that with the site it generated. Check out the mobile version of Read/WriteWeb for example, it has a handheld media type link pointing to itself at m.readwriteweb.com. When an intermediary server like Mowser sees that header we just direct the handset along to the location in that link, even if the link points to the current page. The same thing also seems to work for the intermediate servers like Google. If you’re generating only meant for mobile I suggest putting that header in so that users end up directly at your website instead of getting adapted pages.

While putting together the YouTube linking support on Mowser I noticed something odd. If I bring up a video from m.youtube.com while using the cellular connection in my N95 the flash player errors out before the video starts up, but if I connect over wifi the video plays through no problem. I don’t want this to turn into yet another carrier behavior rant, so I’m just going to ask if anyone knows why that would be and what I need to do to get that fixed.

Russ put up some CSS handling updates on Mowser meant to improve the presentation of sites when being adapted. It’s still pretty experimental, and we might have to add some different defaults in and expose additional controls to publishers. However it’s looking pretty good already. Here are a few sites that show off how it works:

• Techcrunch
• VentureBeat
• Wired

We’re trying to pull what information we can from the desktop version to make the mobile version look similar where possible. Every site uses CSS differently though, and the rules so far are based on trial and error and human inspection. If there are particular rules or transformations we should be paying attention to join us in the forum and let us know.

As suggested by Ewan we’ve now setup a Mowser Weblog specifically for our Mowser related ramblings. Which isn’t to say that I won’t also post stuff here, just that we’ll make sure any “Mowser info” will get posted over there. So that people who want to follow just Mowser stuff without all the random noise that Russ and I end up posting about have a way to do so.

I just got the paperwork back from our lawyers making it official that Mowser is now Mowser Inc.! Russ and I have been hacking away on the site adding new features, fixing bugs, and getting publishers integrated. But we’ve also been batting around a few Big Ideas that extend out beyond content adaption and into the rest of the web. Russ and I have known each other forever (in Internet Time at least). I would have been happy to just run the site informally splitting up the revenue that it throws off. However for some of the other ideas a higher degree of formality was required, so we decided to make everything official.

It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and last time I was involved in the process but not driving it. Much different from this side of the fence. And yet another reason that I’m happy I’ve landed in Silicon Valley and been involved with the people I’ve had a chance to work with. There were literally dozens of people I was able to tap for advice and guidance. All of whom offered some of their time to share insights, explain stuff I didn’t understand, and correct me where I was wrong. Thanks for all the help and encouragement everyone! I’m really looking forward to sharing the progress over the next few months.

I went to the Pizza Hut site to see if the new store just around the corner from my house opened up and was greeted with a little flash animation informing me of “Total Mobile Access!!” for pizzahut.com. “How cool is that!!” I say to myself (I often speak to myself when using the web). I simply must try this out. Turns out they have two options, order via SMS or order via mobile web. Now that’s what I’m talking about! Although I think SMS services are spectacular for some things, for ordering a pizza I want an interface.

I decided to write up the experience not to poke fun at PizzaHut, but to give a concrete example of some of the challenges that you have to face when making a mobile site. I think it’s kick ass that PizzaHut has decided to do something it would call Total Mobile Access. I’m just afraid that they might not get the results they would like to see out of the effort. And it’s our responsibility (those of us trying to work to expand the mobile ecosystem) to figure out how to make these things work better.

The website says I need to create an account on the web before I can order from the mobile site. Oops. That mobile site is going to be really useful when my Google map search that tells me there’s a PizzaHut right around the corner allows me to place an order right then. I’m sure that would be easy for them to fix. But how was the decision made not to allow signup or ordering from the mobile web site? There might have been some technical reasons not to do it, but I’m pretty sure any rational look at expected user behavior would point out that the technical cost is worth paying in this case. More about this later.

Once I setup an account on the desktop side I went and visited the www.pizzahut.com site from the browser on my N95. I waited while it loaded and loaded, it looked the same as the version I saw on the desktop. Turns out they’re doing device detection to redirect the user to the proper version. My device isn’t something they pick up as mobile. And the normal desktop version isn’t something that I can interact with through the Nokia browser either, so no help there.

No problem! I’ll just do it through Opera Mini instead, I’m sure they’ll pick that up as a mobile browser. Indeed they do! However OperaMini can’t parse it right away. It can display the page. I just get an error when I load pages telling me the page has problems, should it be “reparsed as HTML?” (an error which should probably never appear to a user by the way). And even after clicking on that I get a page with fields, but no buttons to do things like login. And the page looked messy, repeated graphics all over. Something was yanking at the back of my mind. It looks like something I can almost remember…..

WAP! It looks like what happens when you parse a WML page as HTML. So I spoofed the headers in my Firefox install to pull up the page, sure enough that’s what it is. The lowest common denominator definitely was WML, but I’m not sure I would use it for anything at this point. It’s kinda seeped out of my mind that it ever existed. Apparently the OperaMini folks, who are no slouches when it comes to mobile prowess in general, seem to think the same way. Just goes to show all the strange errors that creep up when some twist of fate ends you up with forked markup languages. Lets hope nothing like that ever happens again. W3C, I’m looking at you.

I was going to see if I could get the confirmation message for a delivery done via the mobile web delivered via SMS instead of email, but I can’t test that right now cause the store is currently closed and I can’t even go through part of the ordering process. Actually, looking at these pages I might only be able to place an order online for delivery. (Sidenote: my address does not exist in the mind of the database that PizzaHut owns, which is odd cause literally
two blocks away) Maybe I’m doing things a bit weird, but it’s not uncommon for me to include “getting dinner” in a laundry list of other things to do while I’m leaving the house. Get paper towels, drop off the mail, maybe drop in on Fry’s for a bit, and get dinner. The confirmation email about my order, kinda useless. However, letting me know if I can linger in Fry’s for a while longer or if my pizza is currently getting cold, that would actually provide unique mobile value not available before.

Then I started wondering how long PizzaHut have been running this service. Turns out it might have just started a few days ago. (Another sidenote: check out the “press coverage” for this, page after page after page of cut/paste press release with a few people who have cut graphics off the PC website. I wonder if I’m the first non PizzaHut employee to try this thing out). I would really love to see the services evolve. Apparently the decisions behind the mobile website are based on some studies of user behavior, but if you read a few of those news articles it becomes pretty obvious that the marketing department had a heavy hand in what happened to the application. Take this bit for example:

“We’ve designed our ordering system to be user-friendly with just a couple of steps, as opposed to the overly complicated, multiple-step system our competition devised,” Niccol said.

Great idea! Poor execution. If I were PizzaHut this is what I would do:

• XHTML as well as WML, going in that direction is dirt simple.
• You say you’re going for the tech savvy core of folks, but the app itself seems to be designed for the phones the average user would have in their pocket. Excellent to be thinking ahead like that. But in the meantime keep an eye on the devices that are hitting the site and make sure you understand what your users are doing. Closely related to ordering from a handset is ordering from a PSP or DS, anyone tried that? How about from a Wii?
• Allow signups from the mobile, or even better order without signup.
• Send confirmations via SMS when ordering mobile, and if you can provide some extra info like when the pizzas are ready that would be just peachy as well.
• Try doing other things from your mobile and making sure that they do what they should. For example, try a Google Mobile search for ‘pizzahut’ and clicking on the pizzahut.com link that shows up. Right now I’m going to the transcoded version of pizzahut.com instead of to the mobile version cause there’s no header indicating that a mobile version exists.

I think this is a pretty good example of some of the odd pitfalls that exist when doing mobile development for the web. Most people who have never tried it think it just means writing simpler HTML. Most people who have tried it run screaming and are later unable to articulate what exactly it was that made it so difficult. It makes for a pretty impenetrable fog around the whole area, even if there is more overall attention being paid to going mobile. And it doesn’t help that “coverage of mobile” in the media seems to consist almost entirely of cutting and pasting press releases, with the occasional dash of regurgitating the party line spit to you by some exec about their own product (complete with competition bashing).

I just updated the Mowser Wordpress Mobile plugin to add an option to include a link to a handheld stylesheet when generating headers. I put up a minimal stylesheet that you can point the plugin to if you just want the default, it’s at http://pub.mowser.com/media/stylesheets/wordpress.css. Or you can copy down the stylesheet to your server, modify as you want, and change the URL to point to your own version. The difference is actually pretty pleasing, even with the simplistic stylesheet I have up now. Compare the mobile version of this blog to mobilized Wordpress blog without a stylesheet at all.

One of the most kick ass plugins for Wordpress is the Open Web Analytics plugin, I hear people raving about it pretty frequently. Unfortunately I also saw it causing some issues with blogs mobilized through Mowser. There were a few problems actually, which I’m about to send over to the OWA folks to hopefully get patched up in future versions (strings not getting trimmed when there are multiple factors in the X_FORWARDED_FOR header, and skipping localhost when trying to pull out a remote IP). In the meantime here’s a patched version of OWA 1.0.8, the latest stable release.

Russ just posted about a new version of domain mapping we just released for Mowser. There are a bunch of little bug fixes in there as well. One other thing that made it into this version was mobilized feeds. Now when you’re viewing an adapted page that has an RSS feed we’ll add a header that lets you subscribe to the mobilized version of the feed on your device. For devices with the Nokia Open Source browser the action appears under the “Options” menu on the page, you’ll see an entry for “Subscribe” which should have “Mowser version of ….” in a submenu. In Opera Mini it appears at the very top of the page when you load something that has an associated feed.

In the mobilized version of the feed (something Russ posted about when talking about getting bookmarks onto a mobile) the content is left as originally presented, but links are passed through Mowser. I’m not sure how much use there is among the mobile crowd when it comes to feeds, but I’ve always been a big fan of RSS use from mobiles. If this helps even just a little bit with respect to making RSS more useful for mobile users I’ll be a happy camper.

Russ and I sat down in the same room to work on Mowser stuff for pretty much the first time yesterday. Between the holidays and just stuff that had piled up and needed to be done, it was just the first real chunk of time we had to get work done. Both of us have worked remotely or virtual office or whatever you want to call it. I spend a few years actually working with a group of folks I hadn’t met in person till about 2 years into the project.

Still it was amazingly effective to be in the same room working on stuff for a chunk of time. We found a bunch of little bugs, brainstormed how to fix a few issues that were kicking around, and implemented big chunks of a new feature. In a few days we’ll have stuff synced up well and we won’t need to be in the same place. Right now though it’s having a tremendous impact. Much more drastic than I had expected.