Mobile Web's Demise Will Not Impact Mobile 2.0
When Russell Beattie founded Mowser in April of last year, he envisioned a mobile landscape where more and more people were getting online while on the go and how the mobile web would explode in growth. A year later, he has decided to call it quits.
"...I don't actually believe in the "Mobile Web" anymore," he writes on his blog, "and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst. I'm talking specifically about sites that are geared 100% towards mobile phones and have little to no PC web presence."
I tend to agree. Not that I don't believe in Mobile 2.0. To the contrary, I think we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Mobile 2.0. But, as I wrote about while comparing the mobile Internet to the 'real' Internet, the only difference between getting online at home and getting online while on-the-go is the size of the screen.
Smartphones, pocketPCs, and PDA's will soon dominate the mobile market. This will bring a lot of people online while on-the-go, but they won't be looking for websites unique to a 'mobile' web. They want the same Internet they get at home, perhaps customized to the smaller screen, but with the same functionality and features.
This is where Mobile 2.0 comes into the picture. Mobile 2.0 isn't about replacing the Internet, it is about tailoring it to our mobile devices. It's about signing into Facebook and having the social network realize not just that we are on a smaller screen, but that we have access to a camera and GPS.
The mobile web may be dead in the sense that few people want a separate version of the Internet, but Mobile 2.0 is just getting started.
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(Photograph by Tim Bishop for Weber Shandwick Worldwide and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works)
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