1ft Startup

For a long time, I’ve been dying to get back into the LBS space and make something that offers a true, multi-modal experience; I want to email a URL for a bar around and say “Let’s go here” and not care whether people are reading my message on a Blackberry, an iPhone, or at work.

I’m happy to finally have the chance to build it, and we’ve just launched:

http://www.outalot.com

We’re doing NYC as a testing ground for our service, but we will be expanding it into more metro areas soon!

Also, if you’re into this kind of thing, please keep up with us on the blog as well. And as always, feedback is enormously appreciated.

I was about to write an amendment to the previous post per Apple’s recent announcements about the upcoming SDK, but found a few people who already have similar thoughts and concerns. Remember that the iPod already has software developers building things for it, but it hasn’t been a huge codefest bonanza the way it was with, say, Palm software, because Apple has quite a tight grip on who they allow to develop for them and who they don’t (not to mention: they control distribution with the iTunes store).

Nokia and Apple are easily the dominant players in the new generation of high-end handsets. They’re both well poised to do something everyone in the industry has been dreaming of for years: loosening the stranglehold that the carriers have on content and open the market to crazier ideas. My money is on Nokia supporting those endeavors and Apple, well, not so much. I’d say that the great unwashed out here in reality are stuck with Java ME or web apps for at least the near future.. But I would be extremely happy to be wrong.

The hardest part about selling software for the iPhone is, of course, that you can’t really do it.

Apple’s fond of saying that you can do everything you need to in their Safari uber-browser, and that Java is a “heavyweight ball and chain.” However braindamaged one may think Java is, saying that you can satisfy all your development by way of the browser is a total cop-out; There are things that you can do in downloadable software that you simply can’t do on a phone otherwise: Having easy access to carrier billing (all other evilness notwithstanding), access to APIs, local storage, and interface control, to name a few.

For every iPhone that replaces any other handset, be it Java ME, Windows Mobile, or basically anything else, we are losing a potential customer. This will of course be fixed eventually — soon, even — either by us outsiders, or by Apple. Meanwhile, they are taking millions of our customers out of the market. I do expect this to make waves in some shops’ bottom lines in the short term. The first generation iPhone is a huge step forward for mobile in most ways, but in at least a couple ways, it’s a big step back.

I was sitting in the Mobile Mondays NY meeting last week, listening to the SEO advice from the very level-headed guy at Google, and realized that everyone on stage was preaching what we have been trying to educate people on for years in the industry: WAP is different from the Web. It’s really different. You can’t just point people at your .com site and expect their phones not to crash, you need to accommodate users in ways you never have before. At its easiest, this just means directing them to a watered down site with a few pages of text, but if you’re really serious about it, this means building a fully adaptive site that scales its images, custom-tailors its stylesheets (or lack of), and even completely changes the markup from WML to XHTML-MP to CHTML.

That’s what we’ve been preaching for years, and it’s finally about to become irrelevant.
About a million iPhones are out there around now, and growing fast. Maybe even more Nokia N95s or other extra-smart gadgets are out there. Some of the new phones can’t even read WML, but they all execute Javascript like nobody’s business. They’re normal browsers.. nearly. Over the last week, potentially thousands of users stopped going to the mobile-specific sites and started going directly to their usual desktop web sites. Even more people browsed the web for the first time ever on their phones.

What does this mean for the mobile web as we know it so far? Is it so niche that it’s not even worth looking at, because it’ll be so overtaken by users with smart devices that it will become invisible on the radar?

Probably. The mobile web will never be as complicated as it is today. It’s a patchwork of support, where when you evaluate the characteristics of one device, you add support to about 0.8% of your customers. The mobile web sites have been outsourced to development companies that build a mobile-friendly version of the site, usually completely decoupled from the real site, with its own revenue streams. Soon, all you’ll need is a separate stylesheet, if that.

It’s hard to say it, but we knew the day would come: WAP as we know it has peaked and the days of a totally different mobile site will be on their way to the dustbin.

This doesn’t mean that mobile web development will die, it will just become far simpler. I still don’t believe that a page designed for a 19″ display will ever be desirable on a 3″ display, but that’s easier to fix: Most of the changes will be doable with the same content, with a separate stylesheet (incidentally, why doesn’t the iPhone respond to the ‘handheld’ CSS media type so that you don’t have to do any detection at all?). In the meantime, though, those of us who fought for years to explain the dire difference between the two worlds need to adjust our tunes.