1ft Startup

If you’re managing a large site, building the WAP version of your site in a completely isolated environment is an appealing idea. It’s a business experiment, it doesn’t impact the daily site or put it at any risk, and it’s a quick way to get it up and running. This worked extremely well when I built the mobile site for a large news agency — News agencies are in the business of syndication, so they make their data extremely accessible. One of their web developers put it: You turn the tap on, and news is supposed to flow out.

So we launched our mobile news site, it was a huge success, and traffic started flowing in. Eventually, though, we started getting a few complaints that went like this: People were emailing articles to each-other from the web, and when they tried to click the link on their BlackBerries, they were redirected to the front page of the mobile site! They’d get a link from their friend, to:

news-site.com/article/25798470

And when they hit the link on their phone, they’d be detected as mobile and redirected to:

mobile.news-site.com

Not good! The same thing was also happening from users’ RSS readers. We did eventually fix this, but we had to set up some crazy redirects to take care of it (and unify some back-end data more tightly, so we could refer to the same article IDs).

The much cleaner approach would have been an integrated one, that (assuming a MVC model) simply displayed a different View while using the same Model/Controller.

A huge part of WAP consulting these days lies around ‘making the mobile version of my site.’ This is a great way to get things going quickly, but please do this with an eye toward eventually providing airtight site integration!

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.

I wanted to preface this entry with where we left off last year: Hope is not lost for the weekend-warrior mobile game developer! Here are some upsides to try to make you feel better after losing all will to carry on in our last episode:

Mobile games are lo-fidelity. The point here is that it doesn’t take a multimillion-dollar studio to make a game that can compete on a level playing field with everyone else in mobile (yet!).

Distribution isn’t as hard as it looks. Installation is automatic for J2ME apps, so no need to hassle with installers, and there are plenty of sites dedicated to getting a very international distribution for your games. (What kind of volume this actually provides, well, I’m figuring that out now. More on it later)

These are still pretty early days in mobile. The small guys haven’t quite been pushed off the playing field. Most mobile game still really suck (even from the big shops), so if you can do something that’s not a painful, crashing eyesore, you’ve got a decent shot.

Mitosis Launched!

So, since the dawn of time (about 7-8 months ago), Theoretic Labs has been about consulting and helping our friends out with their startups. On the “side” however, we have been working on a LOT of other projects. A few of them will come to fruition in the next few weeks, a few more will come in the months following.

I’m really very excited to announce the first of these, which is a simple game called Mitosis. The basic premise of the game is actually hard to articulate concisely in text, but really easy once you play it for a few seconds. You play the colored cell on the bottom of the screen, and shoot down the incoming cells from the top. You can only destroy the ones that match your color, and if you shoot one that does not match, you’ll swap colors with that cell. Think Zoop (which apparently nobody remembers but me), but simplified angles of play and a little more disgusting.

Why Can’t Anyone Play Mobile Games Online?

I was surprised to find that nearly nobody has a “try this game online for free” type feature for their cell phone games. It seems that this is because it’s really hard to find a decent MIDP 2.0 emulator that runs as an applet in the browser. The closest the real world has got is a handful of commercial products, and a broken open-source one called ME4SE. Well, it turns out that ME4SE isn’t too hard to fix, so I did it for the release of this game. Try it here! I’ll find a way to reapply these fixes back to the OS community after I clean it up a bit.

As a total aside: I know that Java has really lost this web-application technology fight to Ajax and Flash by squandering their early lead with the most spectacular array of installation and execution bugs seen since, well, forever. But please, Java, don’t go away on the web, I need you for an emulator! You can still fix the mess you’ve made.

Mobile Distribution

Our first distribution partners are the low-hanging fruit for indies, Greystripe’s super-clever AdWrap service and ClickGamer, for the more traditional purchased format. We have some people working on our behalf to get our products under the noses of the carriers as well, so with any luck that will pan out in short-ish order.

It’s probably too early to comment on how it’s been working out with these partners so I’ll hold my tongue, but rest assured that will come soon!

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.

I had thought that all there was to mobile wallpaper was the most primitive of human instincts: Babes, cars, bling, etc. Well, a company called Mobux is publishing mobile screensavers by Australian artists in a bid to save the soul (or raise the brow) of mobile content. This was picked up by moconews, who points out that “personalization is no longer just for teenagers and early adopters.” As a developer who has been accomplice to the bittersweet loss of pre-teen innocence by way of their cell phones, I’m impressed by this. I’m sure it’s not the first of its kind, and I’m sure that Mobux has more profitable content categories than this project, but it’s always heartwarming to see some of the industry’s content providers cutting out some of the sleaze-factor.