1ft Startup

I’ve been reading Alex Wipperfurth’s Brand Hijack, a nice little book about the successes and failures of grassroots / user-driven marketing efforts. One brief comment in the first chapter suggests that one of the disappointments of WAP is that it is billed as bringing the Web experience to Mobile. In fact, it’s nothing at all like that, and that’s been the big letdown. I know this point has been rehashed in various ways even in this blog, but this comment struck me.

Can we call WAP the WWW On Your Phone or not?

Surely, the two media have things in common. Technically, they’re based off of the same protocol, and the same hypertext paradigm, with the same core markup capabilities. Both provide an intricate web of information accessible to the user. Mobile browsers even try to render normal web sites.

But there are some important differences: The desktop gives a rich media experience: motion, vector graphics, sound, flash, video, etc. Mobile is largely a simple, restricted browsing experience with maybe a few images; When they try to render those desktop sites, they usually do so in vain. The desktop gives you fast, consistently-connected browsing, but mobile doles out slow, sporadic helpings of bandwidth. The desktop is used in relatively stationary areas, sometimes for long amounts of time. Mobile is what the name implies.

To anyone who has spent ten seconds with a mobile browser, these differences are obvious. The technical intentions are largely the same, but the way people use mobile is totally different. The real question is: are we doing a disservice to WAP by trying to tell people that it’s the same as the desktop Web?

I think so.

To tell users that WAP is the mobile internet is misleading, and sets the whole industry back — users expect to be eating sugar and instead they’re getting salt. Even once networks and browsers improve, the two worlds will never be one. Nor should they be: The interface is different, and the way people want to use them is different.

So why do we keep doing it? Why do we always hurt the ones we love? The problem is a question of what a better metaphor for WAP actually is. If we can’t describe it to a new user in about 5 words, they’re lost. And we just picked up the most technically-direct correlation, which is how we screwed ourselves up in the first place. What is WAP, then? Electronic index cards? A pocket information haiku?

We may well stay stuck here until we can give a simple answer to this most simple question. And like the original web, the answer will inevitably lie in WAP’s emerging applications more than the medium of WAP itself — but that’s a subject for another post.