As soon as I read about LinkedIn Mobile today, I had to try it out. Forget everything you hear about Facebook (and its “mobile” application), LinkedIn is the most useful business networking tool out there, and now that it’s mobile optimized, it’s bound to be even more entrenched in my professional life.Here are some quick screenshots of the beta service on my Samsung Blackjack:
Today Yahoo announced that they’re enabling OpenID on 248 million accounts, which unarguably pushes this single sign-on technology into the mainstream. In my opinion, this is also a huge win for mobile web users too, and here’s why: signing into a mobile website on your mobile is very tedious and painful, and few (if any?) mobile browsers have integrated password management yet. Furthermore, even if you have the patience to tap out your e-mail address and password, some sites won’t take it or throw SSL errors or require JavaScript. For this reason, I have not been able to sign on to mobile Facebook through my Blackjack in, let’s see, ever.
Imagine a web where most sites are now compelled to offer OpenID as an alternate sign-in method (and who will be able to afford ignoring 248 million users?). Suppose that Yahoo makes their OpenID sign-in page incredibly mobile-friendly, a likely scenario. Signing in to web sites through your mobile will become a lot easier, which will in turn make the mobile web that much easier to use and relied upon.
I believe there are three web content related technologies that will help mobile browsing adoption increase dramatically if they become ubiquitous: OpenID (or a standard like it), microformats, and mobile alt links. Let’s see what happens.
In his article The Analyst, The iPhone, And The Future Of The Mobile Web, Dan Frommer recaps a discussion regarding the pros/cons of iPhone-style powerful mobile browsers that access anything which “signals the beginning of the end for the mobile Web as we know it today” vs. the utility of mobile-specific websites. After conceding that mobile browsers suck, he goes on (emphasis added):
But even if someday everyone has a browser as powerful as the iPhone’s Safari, that doesn’t fix the screen-size problem [...] even if developers use proper Web coding standards, “normal” Web sites will always be crippled on iPhones and similar mobile devices.
Anyone who has used the iPhone on AT&T’s pokey EDGE data connection also knows that the bandwidth just isn’t there yet to browse hi-fi Web sites and actually enjoy it. And for the foreseeable future, there are things you can do with a computer that you simply can’t do with phones, such as hovering a mouse cursor over part of a Web site, browsing with Java-based navigation, right-clicking on links and elegantly using multiple browser windows.
The near future of the Internet is going to look a lot like it did in the last decade, when content creators made separate sites for broadband and dialup users. The “real” Web will continue to get more and more multimedia-heavy, with Java, Flash, and video offerings designed for broadband connections. And the mobile Web should continue as a separate entity, accounting for smaller displays, and focusing on faster-loading, lo-fi content and simple navigation with fat fingers in mind.
I sadly agree that is what will probably happen for large corporate sites or web-only businesses (like Facebook), but I would like to add that Skweezer will bridge the gap for the rest of the web which I believe will remain in the majority. Anyone who thinks there will be both desktop and mobile versions of every site is deluding themselves. Remember the early days of Firefox when IE-specific sites would warn you to download IE in order to log in? Few sites responded with separate versions (or even separate stylesheets) for each browser, but the standard accepted practice is to make your site work on all major browsers. By using good web standards, XHTML and CSS and graceful fallbacks (like specifying onclick AND href for your A tags), web authors can be sure their sites will live long and prosper.
Skweezer has just been updated this evening. For one thing, the home page is quite different. After quite a bit of customer feedback, we’ve backed down from the one-size-fits-all mentality and have left one interface for phones and another for everyone else. The major change is to put the “Skweeze” box back on the home page, which can be used to start browsing or searching.
Another change we’ve made is to de-emphasize the mobile versions of websites, again due to feedback. Mobile purists have argued that if there’s a mobile version of a desktop website, that should be front and center on the mobile device. Mobile versions often have severely reduced functionality, however. That’s why as of today, the mobile version (if we know about it) becomes a link at the top of the page, on par with RSS links. Furthermore, for those sites that force users to view the mobile version based on browser detection (USAToday.com is one example), we’ve given our users the option to appear as a desktop browser if they so choose, by selecting the new “Identify as desktop computer” checkbox in their preferences.
Skweezers appears better on the iPhone in this release, now that we’re constraining the page “viewport” width to 320 pixels using a meta tag.
Finally, it seems that some sites simply don’t support JavaScript-less browsers, most notably PayPal’s desktop version. We are experimenting with a subset of our users to allow JavaScript back in Skweezer, and we plan to detect and expand JavaScript and CSS rendering in the future.
Not to harp, but I’ve enjoyed reading one particular aspect of the conversation surrounding the most anticipated phone of the year, as follows:
A Trade-Off on iPhone Data Speed (John Markoff, NYT): “On the eve of the Apple iPhone’s debut, the top executives of Apple and AT&T today defended their decision to rely upon AT&T’s slow Edge wireless data network, rather than a faster network that is less widely available. Early reviews of the iPhone, while positive, have faulted the slower network because it will limit the palm-sized wireless computer’s utility in making the Internet easily accessible on the go.”
iPhone Blindness (Scott Karp, Publishing 2.0): “Buying an iPhone is like buying a MacBook that only supports dial-up access. [...] How can iPhone reviewers tout the web browser as the “real dazzler” and the “closest thing to the real Internet” when it crawls along like a 1400 baud modem?”
iPhone ‘Surfing’ On AT&T Network Isn’t Fast, Jobs Concedes (WSJ): “Mr. Jobs acknowledged that the company’s new iPhone won’t surf the Internet as fast as he would like on the network, called ‘Edge,’ but added that the device’s ability to connect to Wi-Fi hotspots would give consumers a speedier alternative for Web browsing.”
I think it’s clear that the reviewers equate the utility of mobile browsing with speed. If only there were some free mobile proxy web service that would compensate for the EDGE network’s lower speed without requiring a download and installation. I guess we’ll just have to wait until some enterprising company builds such a thing, or we could wait until all of our favorite websites make cunning little mobile versions. Until then, nobody should buy an iPhone, or any other AT&T phones that surf the so-called mobile Internet! That will teach them.
