Over the holiday season, I watched Chicken Run on TV .
At the end of the movie, the chickens debate the proverbial question: What came first – the chicken or the egg …
This made me think of the Mobile Web ..
There is no doubt that when we think of the Web vs. the Mobile Web, there is no ‘Chicken and Egg’ question: the Web came first ..
Yet, why does the Mobile Data Industry often try to think that it is distinct from the Web?
Why don’t we like the idea of ‘One Web’?
Let me put this in perspective with a very concrete, personal example.
Like my friends and two of the best known bloggers on the Web, Richard Mc Manus
and Robert Scoble , I am a huge fan of the Google Reader
I had some trouble getting the Google Reader to work on the new mobile phone I got. So, I searched for alternative RSS readers.
The problem was not finding some excellent mobile RSS readers – there are truly some excellent mobile RSS readers out there.
The problem was my ‘tags’. In other words – the metadata.
Once I had been using the Google reader for some time, the posts were classified using various tags. No matter how good the mobile readers were, I had no intention of recreating my tags and maintaining two sets of metadata.
So, after some work, I got the Google Reader to work on the phone and now it works great.
This may well be an important lesson for creators of Mobile Web applications – you can’t ignore the Web and the question of the Metadata. People will always use the Web first and that factor must be taken into account when creating new Mobile applications.
In fact, if you read posts from Scoble, Steve Reubel et al , there is a strong possibility that the Google Reader could take over the functions of Digg using the ‘sharing’ feature of Google Reader.
With many top bloggers already using Google Reader, I would definitely welcome this possibility.
This again reemphasises my point that the ‘Web’ reader will get ‘better at a faster rate’.
A ‘mobile only’ application cannot hope to match that. Especially, as more metadata gets captured on the Web, Mobile applications cannot ignore the Web.
This was largely the point of Mobile Web 2.0 i.e. you cannot think of Mobile Web 2.0 in isolation i.e. we defined Mobile Web 2.0 within the context of Web 2.0
PS: I am sure you must be wondering, which one is sadder ..
a) I watch Chicken Run
b) I think of the mobile data industry at the end of the movie
c) This post is created at around 20:00 UK time on Dec 31 2006 , here in the UK or even worse …
d) The other documents I am also reading now are about Discrete event simulation techniques and about the Graph theory (relating to my PhD)
e) And finally that .. my verdict on Chicken Run is : I like the Old fashioned Hanna Barbera style animation compared to the newer Wallace and Gromit style animation Stop Motion animation!
Happy New Year everyone!
Image source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120630/
