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2010 the year of the Mobile Web

This year I am making only one predication. It is a bold predication. Not in the sense the technology is nascent or the market is not evolved, actually quite the opposite. It is bold in that I have made this prediction several times before and have repeatedly been proven wrong. 

This year is different. I feel the winds are finally behind me. I will say it again: 2010 is the year of the Mobile Web.

There it is. Clearly there are a lot of other big trends afoot: Cloud computing, intelligent content, micro-formats and RDF going mainstream with Google Snippets, twitter, twitter, twitter. But all of this will pale in comparison to the Mobile Web. 

My bet this year is on mobile, not because of the billons of iPhone app downloaded, or the buzz around the new Google Android handsets, or that finally the carriers' walled gardens have fallen flatter than the Berlin Wall, or the fact that there are more mobile phones than TV sets. 2010 will go mobile because of Facebook.

Recently Facebook quietly announced they had 65 million unique users from mobile devices in the month of August. Yes, 65 million. That's more than a 300% increase from December 2008 when 20 million users accessed Facebook through apps and the company's mobile web site. Those numbers are staggering. It is a sea change. One quarter of all Facebook users logged in with mobile devices. That is more than the entire population of France accessing Facebook from mobile devices in one month. If this is not a "tipping point" I am not sure what is. 

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was once quoted as saying, "mobile will be a larger business than the PC-Web." That is a big statement. If the trends that Facebook is seeing continue he may be proved right sooner than later.

But the point that tends to get obscured is that mobile is a different medium than the PC-web. A successful mobile strategy needs to account for more than fitting a small form factor; it has to embrace the entire medium. Today mobile means that content is location aware, has structure so it can get easily repurposed, can easily be shared, is often pushed rather than pulled from the server, has utility so it is helpful for people on the move, is standards-based so it can be rendered on lots of devices and platforms, and most importantly it is communication.

Despite all the bells and whistles, a phone is still a communications device. It is just that the scope of communication has evolved. It is no longer just voice, but TXT, chat, tweets and social networking. That is one of the reasons that Facebook has been so far in front of the growth curve for mobile. Facebook is a form communication. It is a natural for the Mobile Web.

Content on Facebook is also poetry, the verse to Wikipedia's prose. What I mean is the content on Facebook tends to be very short. It is an alert, an update, an image... This is a good lesson for anyone planning a mobile strategy for 2010: make your content poetry. Focus on delivering concise content that fits the mobile medium. Mobile is great for delivering news briefs, events, sports scores, photos, tweets, and useful information like maps, bus routes, directories, fill-in-the-blank. No one wants brochure-ware on a phone.

Mobile is also about engagement. Your mobile user is not the casual web surfer; they are your most important customer, your membership for an association, your students and alumni for a university. Mobile should be personal. Your mobile site should know the user, store their preferences, and deliver relevant content. Use mobile to drive loyalty programs or deliver key services. On the Mobile Web the medium is the message, and the medium is about engagement and communication.

At Ingeniux we are developing solutions to help customers succeed on the mobile web. For starters we have developed a whole new mobile client for our Cartella Social Content Management software. Cartella enables organizations to manage social communications and business collaboration. It is like Facebook with business tools. The Cartella mobile client (pictured above) works out-of-the-box to deliver a personalized and engaging mobile experience. It works on any web-enabled smart phone or device, including iPhone, Android-powered phones, and Blackberry.

Ingeniux CMS is also a great solution for deploying mobile websites. Key advantages include the use of structured XML, support for device rendering and profiling, content reuse, user authentication and personalization.

Few know that Ingeniux was founded as a content management solution for the wired and wireless web. Mobile had equal billing in Ingeniux's early days. Fewer know I was one of Ingeniux's first customers for mobile content deployment. We launched a major application in the walled gardens of Sprint, AT&T and other carriers. The technology worked great, the eyeballs never appeared. Everyone's hope for the mobile web turned into ringtones and games, content never emerged

Looking back, it makes me think of a rare tropical tree in the South Pacific called the Mangosteen. Once planted, the Mangosteen takes 10-years to bear fruit, making it very rare indeed. But for those few who have tried it, the flavor is incomparable. It is the best thing on earth they have ever tasted.

This year I think the Mobile Web will be like the Mangosteen. Having grown quietly, over 10 years, on a remote island in the web, it is finally bearing fruit. It is now fully ripe and was well worth the wait.

Posted by David Hillis at 4:00 pm