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It may be Mobile, but is it the Web?

With the advent of iPhone, there’s been a rise in talk about the “mobile Web”. The Web itself has been mobile for several years – at least since I strapped a wireless modem onto the back of my Palm Pilot (this would have been 1998 or 1999) and started surfing.

What we have now isn’t precisely the mobile Web. It is mobile, and some of it does involve the Web (or, more precisely, HTTP), but that is not the whole of the story, or, in eighteen month’s time, will that even be the biggest part of the story.

I’ve already installed my first 3G killer app on my iPhone – SimplifyMedia. It became immediately clear – just over the course of a 30 minute walk to the grocery and back – that I would blow through my rather meager 500MB Vodafone data cap very quickly using SimplifyMedia. Streaming media is just too irresistible.

Streaming media is not specifically a Web technology. It integrates well with the Web, it can even be delivered via the Web, but it is not the Web.

Qik and Flixwagon, which both provide live video broadcasting from my iPhone, do post those videos to a website. But very little of the Web is involved in moving the video stream from my iPhone to their respective sites. So, once again, this is not the mobile Web. This is something else.

And I’m convinced that using the term “mobile Web” will only constrain our ability to entertain the possibilities for pervasive 3G networks.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 7:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “It may be Mobile, but is it the Web?”

  1. chris Says:
    August 21st, 2008 at 8:54 am

    “And I’m convinced that using the term “mobile Web” will only constrain our ability to entertain the possibilities for pervasive 3G networks.”

    Yeah, I think the distinctions implicit in our vocabulary have reached their limits. Everything is wiring up and connecting. The Web is just a container whose bounds are quickly eroding. I don’t want mobile web. I want a mobile device that supports the content, connections, and functionality in the cloud and across social nets that I find valuable. I want desktop applications that wire seamlessly into communication channels, dynamic data streams, and hosted services. I want mobile devices that provide appropriate capture and broadcast functionality, searching & streaming, and scaled integration with my workspaces, local and networked.

    I like the term “cloud” because it suggests something non-local and ubiquitous; a sort of digital aether, if you will. It’s everywhere and there are a myriad of entry points and integrations possible.

  2. oliverw Says:
    August 27th, 2008 at 4:32 pm

    My (late) 2cents:
    Mobile Web = within a mobile browser (e.g. Mobile Safari, Opera Mini, etc)
    Mobile Internet = Mobile internet applications (e.g. Twitteriffic, email, iPhone Google Maps etc) + Mobile Web

    wadda ya reckon?

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