Robert Scoble writes that Microsoft and Yahoo’s attempt to merge is good for Google’s mobile ambitions. I have stripped down his very long post to the bare essence:

Google stands to gain HUGE by slowing down this deal. …the real race today [is]…for ownership of your mobile phone. …every month that Microsoft and Yahoo will be stuck in some courtroom arguing out why this is a good deal means money in the bank for Google as they close mobile phone deal after mobile phone deal. … IM is harder to monetize than email is. Do we really think Google is concerned about either email or IM? [No.] Why not? Because they aren’t taking their eye off the mobile ball.

There’s lots of redundancy between Yahoo’s and Microsoft’s global efforts, but it’s not a perfect overlap. For example, I use both Yahoo Go and Live Search Mobile on my Windows Mobile-based Blackjack. The map and business listings and the new voice-recognition “speak” feature are better on Live, but reading the news, weather, and using Flickr is better on Yahoo’s Go. A single combined app with the best of both would be incredible, but I expect that culture clash will keep the Live and Go teams at odds for some time, until the stronger team devours the weaker. Ah, capitalism.

In the meantime, Google will forge ahead with Android (even a delayed Android) and let MSFT+YHOO cannibalize itself and give up the rapidly growing mobile market. It’s feasible but not guaranteed. After all, it’s easy to claim that unreleased software will someday crush other software.

I got a new phone a few weeks ago: the Samsung Blackjack, otherwise known as the SGH-i607. It works great with Skweezer, and since it’s a Windows Mobile device, I’ve also gotten a chance to see it in action with the Yahoo! Go and Live applications, both of which have their pluses (Flickr/Maps & Directions respectively) and minuses. Overall I’m very pleased with the new phone though.

One thing that has been a little odd has been the fact that sometimes my network connection has trouble restarting. After the phone has been idle for a while, and more often when I’ve traveled (perhaps switching cell towers?) my phone’s browser would be unable to make any connections. Navigating to new pages would show “Connecting” in the status bar for a few minutes before returning an error. Network-enabled applications such as Yahoo! Go would also stop working, showing time-out errors or “unable to refresh” messages. I called up Cingular AT&T tech support and they told me it was probably a coverage problem: they claimed you need at least four bars to browse the web, whereas you can send SMS and talk with fewer bars of course. That is only half the story, as this problem sometimes crops up even with great signal. Fortunately, I finally found the cause and solution.

After downloading a utility from Microsoft that tests the network, I concluded that it was probably an IP/DHCP problem. If it were a computer, I could renew my IP address at the command line or use the “repair my network connection” utility in Windows which does the same behind the scenes. How do you renew your IP address on a Windows Mobile phone? You can restart the phone for ten minutes, buy network utility apps for this, or you can use this little trick, which is quick and free.

1. Access the Wireless Manager application. You can quickly get to it on the Blackjack by pressing the power button on the top and then selecting #2.
2. Disable the phone. This is “airplane mode”.
3. Enable the phone.
4. Wait until the phone displays the network is available. On my phone at my house, it shows “Home Service” (which is a lie) then “Emergency Service” (which is disturbing) before settling on “AT&T”.
5. Resume network-dependent activities. It is usually not necessary to restart the offending application, just retry whatever it was that failed, such as refreshing content or navigating to a link.

I can not yet figure out how to make YouTube mobile work with the built-in Media Player. However I stopped trying to make it work after I realized that I do not care to watch YouTube on my mobile phone.

We just updated Skweezer again this afternoon with a few minor stability fixes and improvements. Among them:

• Once you log in, you now remain logged in for two weeks.
• For more modern phones Skweezer now allows limited CSS information which should make many pages look nicer and less bare. If you have a nice big color display, you should be able to use it. Of course, this means the page is not as small as before, but we want to push the limits of your phone’s browser.
• We’ve corrected HTML entity decoding errors that prevented some pages with foreign characters to display correctly.
• Device recognition has had an overhaul so that we can match unknown devices much better and we’re more likely to underestimate your device capabilities than overestimate them, if we can’t determine the device make and model.
• For desktop browsers, the images are not as overly compressed as they were. We’ll see how this works with our CPU and bandwidth.

We have done away with ASP.NET forms authentication once again due to its unreliability with mobile devices. ASP.NET second-guesses cookie setting somewhere, and sadly some cookies were being changed from absolute expiration to session cookies. This would require people to log in every time they closed their browser. Since user login is only protecting bookmarks now, we transitioned to a more mobile friendly home-grown solution.

For those devices that support it, CSS is limited to formatting elements only. Rules that influence properties such as margin, top, left, and padding are removed. CSS works for inline formatting, style blocks, and external style sheets. We do not yet handle @import declarations or composite rules such as “border: 1px solid black”. Here is the list of CSS properties that Skweezer currently supports: background-color, border-color, border-style, color, clear, float, display, font-family (generic names only), font-size (non-numeric only), font-style, font-weight, text-align, text-decoration, text-transform, vertical-align, and visibility. We are debating removing “float” because it does tend to make the document flow strange on small screens. Update: float is out; testers confirmed it is not good for small screens.

One major improvement with device recognition was the removal of strings such as “UP.Link/6.3.0.0.0″ from the end of the user agent. OpenWave has gateway software deployed at various carriers which rewrites the user agent with the software’s version. Although we thought that our fuzzy match algorithm took this into account, the removal of the version string makes the recognition engine much more reliable. We are also now trying to capture unknown user agents in an effort to do more research on their limitations.

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.

We have reached a resolution regarding our DNS problem with BulkRegister. Meetings were had, apologies were offered and promises made. In the end, no system can 100% guard against human error, and they assure us that was the root problem here. We’re now faced with the choice of staying with BulkRegister, who now promises never to turn off skweezer.net again, or find another company whose trustworthiness has yet to be tested. For our part, we feel that now that our account has been admitted into BulkRegister’s theoretical gold club it’s worth staying with them and fostering this relationship.

Question: if someone claims {choose: (ask/yahoo/google/microsoft).com} is a fraudulent site, are they automatically disabled? I think not. What does it take to get in this club? Why is there a club in the first place?
We have learned that DNS is really an unavoidable single point of failure for a web company and deserves equal security attention/planning as network, hardware, and power. This saga also demonstrates how going after the registrar and not the ISP or hosting company of phishers is most effective; it really cuts a site off at the knees. For my part, I am tired of being on the wrong end of the digilantes who don’t understand that Skweezer is a mobilizing web proxy service, not a copyright infringer or phishing portal. That’s partly why I have this blog, so that one of these posts will be one of the top search results for “skweezer phishing” or “skweezer is stealing my content!” For all of you who got here and still are wondering: No, it’s not.

Update: Skweezer.net DNS came back online around 11 PM last night, as far as I could tell. Was it a mistake? Does the abuse department at eNom have someone on call at night? I still don’t know even this morning. In the meantime, I am investigating DNS monitoring services such as DNS Stuff’s DNSAlert. DNS is as much a part of security as RAID or UPS.

Right now www.skweezer.net is completely down because our registrar BulkRegister/eNom has suspended DNS service, despite communicating with us earlier in the month. The reason? We’ve been reported once again as a phishing site, which we’re not, obviously. I believe the true culprit is Netcraft’s overly zealous anti-phishing service (more details why I think this below), but BulkRegister has not evaluated the claim appropriately. I guess we’re going to have to get this out of the way once a year, but once again, repeat after me: Skweezer is not a phishing site. In the meantime, if you want to access Skweezer, you’ll have to do it via IP address: http://72.1.97.146/, or try our temporary alternate domain: http://www.skweezer.org. The problem with the IP address URL is a new one to me:

The biggest issue in my opinion is that there’s no real due process, unlike last year. We did get some communication earlier in the month from eNom, which shows that they were in turn notified of Skweezer by Netcraft:

From: abuse [mailto:abuse@enom.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 9:40 AM
To: msato@gwcorp.net
Subject: FW: Phishing domain registered by enom

Your domain name is redirecting to a confirmed phishing website (see URL below). In order to prevent the possible disabling of your domain name, please take the necessary steps in order have the abusive content disbanded.
Failure to comply with this request could result in the placing of a registrar-hold on your domain name, which will block DNS resolution to this domain. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.

Regards,
eNom, Inc.

—–Original Message—–
From: Netcraft Phishing Service [mailto:toolbar@netcraft.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 5:15 AM
To: Brad Bailey; NOC; abuse
Cc: phish-isp-alert@netcraft.com
Subject: Phishing domain registered by enom

The URL below has been confirmed by Netcraft as a phishing
site:

https://www.skweezer.net/s.aspx/https/www~paypal~com/

We are reporting it to you because there are indications that the domain in the url is registered by you. Details:

whois server “whois.enom.com”

Our media relations person replied that same day with what I consider a very nice explanatory e-mail, and never received a response, despite later follow-up:

Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2007 10:49:18 -0700
To: ‘abuse’ <abuse@enom.com>, <phish-isp-alert@netcraft.com>
Subject: RE: Phishing domain registered by enom

To whom it may concern:

The URL “https://www.skweezer.net/s.aspx/https/www~paypal~com/” is NOT a phishing site. The domain “skweezer.net” is a mobile transcoding service that’s been operating since 2001. The URL above is how “https://www.paypal.com” is accessed through our transcoding system that mobilizes Web content for cell phones and PDAs. PayPal is aware of our service and we’re discussing the possibility of mobilizing their online payment properties. If you have any questions please call (removed). Thank you and I hope we can resolve this issue quickly.

This afternoon they simply turned us off at around 5 PM Pacific time. As soon as I determined that it was not a server crash, power outage, or network problem, I called up BulkRegister and got someone on the phone within minutes (which is good). He cheerfully informed me that our domain was suspended for phishing. The only way to get it turned back on is by emailing abuse@enom.com, and there’s no phone number, nobody on staff over the evening to turn this back on. I volunteered to fly up to Seattle this evening to deal with eNom in person tomorrow morning, and that may still happen. The repercussions will not be good. We’ve been with BulkRegister for several years, but I have a feeling that 2007 will be the last.

Have you had any problems with eNom, BulkRegister, Netcraft, or another service that marked you erroneously as a spammer or phisher with no recourse? If so, post a link in the comments here. Also, we’re on the lookout for a DNS registrar that’s going to be in our corner, just like Data393 has been in our corner for hosting (they are awesome, by the way). If you’ve had a good experience, I’d like to know about that too.

I joined Facebook mainly so I could test how it works over Skweezer, even though they already have a mobile interface and no offsite links. To complete the circle, today I created a Skweezer group in Facebook to see if it could be useful, although it’s by no means an official forum. I figure that at some point someone’s going to create a Facebook group about Skweezer, it might as well be one of us.

Do you use Facebook and Skweezer? Join our group and post a note on our wall, or better yet a picture of Skweezer in action. It is extremely gratifying to all of us when we read about how people enjoy using Skweezer, and we’re constantly looking for ways to connect with our users people.

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.

An anonymous commenter left the following message on our feedback form the other day:

Just bought an iPhone and have been very disappointed with the slow speed of the Internet on Edge.
Your site compressed a 50 second navigation down to 10 seconds on a favorite web site.
Unbelievable ! ! !
Thanks for an outstanding tool ! ! !

The user agent and IP address indicates this person left the comment via the iPhone itself. This is incredibly gratifying for us to read. Skweezer makes ordinary websites much faster on the iPhone on EDGE or any phone on any network, no lie. It’s like a free speed upgrade to the EDGE network. I can’t wait to unleash our new upgrades to Skweezing technology which will compress web pages to an astounding degree, up from just unbelievable.

I just posted a list of my favorite mobile alternative sites (sites which are the mobile version of a regular website), and it struck me how few of these sites actually use the .mobi top level domain. It is kind of sad how little .mobi has caught on, just like mobile-specific style sheets in the wild are few and far between. How are mobile users supposed to discover where they can get their mobile content? Some sites automatically sense the mobile browser’s user agent and adjust themselves accordingly, which I think is ideal. For every other site, are we supposed to try to load the “real” site in our mobile browsers, hope it doesn’t crash, then try to find the “mobile verison” link buried in the footer? It would be really nice if there was standard markup or HTTP header standard to redirect mobile clients to a mobile-friendly version. For example, I would love to see something like this embedded in the HEAD of the LA Times homepage:

<link href="http://mobile.latimes.com/" rel="alternate" media="mobile" type="text/xhtml" />

Update (1/18/08): According to Russell Beattie, it’s possible right now. The media type is “handheld”, not “mobile” but it works. Now use it!

Until that day comes, site owners are doomed to make up their own standard. Lately M-dot subdomains have become popular, and mobile-dot or wap-dot sites have been around even longer. Other sites put the mobile version in a separate sub-directory. Based on my current site list, here’s a chart breaking down the methods that various websites use to distinguish their mobile content. Legend: SLD = second-level domain (like m.flickr.com); I realized too late that the correct term is third-level, but that collides with TLD which is top-level domain (as in .mobi) so I hope this chart still makes sense. The point is that the majority of sites that I could find for my list indicate mobile content with subdomains. Yes, not a very scientific study, I admit. Yes, I know there are 500,000 .mobi registrations, but squatters and ChadsAwesomeWebsite.mobi don’t count; I’m talking about discoverability. Where the heck is slashdot.mobi? How come this site doesn’t work as wordpress.mobi?

When it comes to the subdomains themselves, which is currently the most popular? I couldn’t stop making charts, so here’s another one (to the left). M-dot is the cool newcomer, but still in the minority. Mobile-dot is the current leader, followed by trusty ol’ wap-dot. It seems like a lot of companies consider “.com” as part of their name, or at least think their customers do.

Here’s a marketing idea for the dot mobi people, who are trying to buck this trend: make free .mobi redirects for the top 10,000 websites that don’t already have a .mobi domain, but may have a mobile version somewhere. For those without a decent mobile site, redirect their “trial” .mobi domain to their main site through a mobile transcoder. Heck, just do it for Typepad.com, WordPress.com, and Blogger.com and you’ll have millions of sites right there. At the end of a month or two, turn it off and have your sales people call them up to explain the drop in traffic. If that doesn’t sell cnet.mobi, I don’t know what will. It will have the added benefit of making customers expect the .mobi TLD. When their customer service lines light up with “how come your mobile site stopped working” calls, they’ll realize their customers have mobile browsers and they’re using them.