Peeking at the Future of Mobile

The mobile medium is one of the most exciting areas for innovation these days, as leading-edge Web 2.0 technologies and strategies (social networking, user-generated content, AJAX, widgets) start to intersect with the latest device trends, such as 24/7 availability, broadband, and location awareness. It's a complicated matrix so it's hard to guess exactly how the dynamics will play out. But some recent items in the news give interesting peeks.

At the recent Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco the founders of Zumobi, a mobile widget application, offered a list of six attributes required for success in the mobile space, summarized in Tom Krazit's One More Thing blog on CNET:

• Immediacy: the entire interaction with the device should occur with 15 seconds


• Adaptability: input on mobile devices is still a challenge and continues to evolve. Applications shouldn't depend on a single input method--it might become obsolete


• One-handed use: research shows that with mobile devices, people tend to create content with two hands and consume it with one hand. Mobile users consume far more content than they create, so devices should be optimized for this interaction.


• Visual elegance: devices such as the iPhone have raised the bar in terms of expectations about the visual user experience. Going forward, successful applications need to meet or exceed these standards.


• Put the user in control: Based on their experience with PCs, users are used to a certain level of control over the desktop, applications, etc. The mobile market, now dominated by carriers, doesn't offer comparable configurability, but it should.


• Thinking differently: never forget, mobile is a whole new world; quite possibly the rules that govern the web don't apply. For example, while online applications aim to be "sticky," in mobile it's ok to be "bouncy," allowing people to dip in and out of the application quickly. If your application is easy to use on the go, people will come back frequently.

The Zumobi founders, Ben Bederson and John SanGiovanni, have high praise for the iPhone as a device that points toward the future of mobile computing. As Krazit puts it, they believe the iPhone represents "the successful amalgamation and commercialization of design tidbits that had been circulating for years." The ability to synthesize existing features into a revolutionary leap forward is a key element in the process of inventing the future.

Meanwhile, yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle noted that in the US, the Latino demographic is the early and frequent adopter of a spectrum of mobile services beyond voice, including "messaging, downloading music, surfing the Web and e-mailing." A professor quoted in the article commented, "Things other people do on computers, a lot of Latinos do on cell phones."

It took marketers awhile to catch on to the power and vision of the Latino mobile opportunity. At first they were hindered by patronizing stereotypes that the demographic would prefer cheap, simplistic phones. On the contrary, Latinos were early adopters of the original $600 Motorola Razr. The Chronicle concludes, "Latinos are quick to embrace new technology, seeing in it a way to get ahead in life."

Takeaway for those designing or testing mobile services: be sure to include Latinos in your plans and observe their behavior carefully. They're an important mobile technology bellwether.

Some of the Chronicle's observations were drawn from a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project on Mobile Access to Data and Information. The December 2007 survey reveals that 62% of American adults have used either a mobile phone or PDA for a non-voice data application, or a wireless laptop connection. A majority of Americans (51%) now say their mobile phone would be the hardest technology to give up--ahead of the internet (45%), television (43%), and email (37%).

Currently 75% of Americans have a mobile phone and/or PDA. Of those, 77% have used the device for at least one non-voice application and 42% report that they engage in mobile data activity on a typical day. The Pew study found a strong affinity between mobile data applications and the Latino market, where 84% have mobile phones. Regardless of ethnicity, age is also highly correlated with mobile data use: 96% of the 18-29 age group who have mobile phones have used them for at least one data application, and 73% say they do so on a typical day. In that demographic, 62% say it would be hard to do without a mobile phone, compared to 51% who feel that way about the internet.

Trendwatch: What Can Web 2.0 Do for [Your Business Here]

In the past few weeks I’ve heard from several companies that are interested in using Web 2.0 techniques and technologies to enrich their online businesses. The interesting twist is that they aren’t media companies; they’re leading brands in fields such as e-commerce, financial services, and hardware. The Web 2.0 phenomenon has become such a vital element of the online user experience that audiences are demanding it on all the sites they frequent. It’s changed the way people see their own role in terms of interacting with businesses and information.

Web 2.0 started as a media tool that enriched content, generated more pageviews to monetize through advertising, offered a low-cost alternative to content creation, and opened additional channels for distributing content. Using strategies such as AJAX, it provided a richer and more information-dense environment with less visual clutter. It gave the audience a seat at the table rather than a glass pane to press their noses against. The response was highly favorable: sites that adopted a Web 2.0 approach noticed they had more visitors who returned more often, spent more time on the site, and created lots of content. Web 2.0, it turned out, leads to the prized results of deeper brand engagement and loyalty.

If you need a refresher course in Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly defined it in detail in a well known article he wrote in 2005 (now available in your choice of eight languages). As a quick primer, he contrasts the 1.0 and 2.0 web experiences like this:

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	participation
content management systems	-->	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	syndication

The time that’s passed since the Web 2.0 concept was defined is like eons in “internet time,” yet surprisingly many major sites still haven’t gotten the message, and some Web 1.0 sites are still attracting investment and launching, seemingly oblivious to progress in the last five years. Against that backdrop it’s exciting to see online businesses beyond the media industry starting big initiatives to tap into Web 2.0’s power to engage customers, expose them to more products, solve problems, and spend more time on the site. Tools such as community, platforms for user-generated content (discussion groups, blogs, wikis), ratings, RSS feeds, AJAX, multimedia, tagging, and facilitating peer-to-peer interaction vs. a linear business-to-customer approach, are quickly becoming the norm for a spectrum of online activities, not only defining the user experience in the media niche.

In the next waves to break, Web 2.0 is expanding to mobile (the “phonetop”) and ideas about Web 3.0 are starting to coalesce. These days, whatever your online business, envisioning the future in 1.0 terms is like trying to get a clearer picture by adjusting the rabbit ears on a black-and-white TV.

April 12, 2007: As the Medium Evolves, So Do the Metrics

You may have noticed the recent news item in Mediaweek that people are starting to worry that newer web functionality, such as AJAX, will undercut traditional web site performance metrics, particularly pageviews. AJAX provides a faster, sleeker, more interactive user experience that bypasses page reloads for many common interactions. For example, it plays a key role in the application-like interfaces of such services as Yahoo mail and Google maps.

Now it appears that, as AJAX inevitably evolves from cutting edge to commonplace, the media industry is awakening to the pageview issue and pondering options. As the Mediaweek article notes, one possibility is increased attention to the metric of total time spent on the site--the product of total visits and average time per visit.
We've been watching this number for awhile. It's been growing as we've made the site more interactive, diverse, and engaging. In fact, although we received more pageviews in January of this year than in March, in terms of audience time on the site the reverse was true: total minutes edged up by about 1.5%, to a new record. March minutes on the site in 2007 were 117% higher than the same month last year. We like the total time metric not only because it's AJAX-neutral, but also because it gives a fair accounting for audience activities such as consuming audio, video, slide shows, and community activities.

By the way, you can configure AJAX functions to refresh the ads when the user takes action, meaning that while we may lose pageviews, we don't lose ad impressions.

This isn't the first time a key online business metric has been eclipsed. Remember the dark ages, 10 years ago, when site performance was all about "hits?" Usually that meant server calls. In the old days, many web pages were so simple that the entire page would load in a single call. As pages became more complex, with a myriad of calls, the "hit" metric was diluted until it was meaningless and the pageview came into favor. Today, a few more years down the pike, the pageview is approaching obsolescence.

The changing landscape of key performance indicators (KPIs) is part of the experience of building a new industry from the ground up. Even the most fundamental definitions of success are in flux. While some may find the uncertainty unsettling, we're excited by the opportunity to take an active role in helping to shape the new benchmarks.