Internet gave birth to content in new and innovative ways. One can today find any kind of information weather its news (international or local), weather information, bank account or travel information etc. There was a growing trend in late 90's to put everything online including humans (soft identity).
Wireless brought with it the trend to have access to communication anytime anywhere. The WAP sites, the sms based content, the mobile carrier portals all tried to follow the same principle and make available content in wireless world, but in their own individual fashion. Each of these created their own individual different small worlds where the homogeneity of internet just died away. Though these small worlds have led to small and big successes of their own, but accessing content on mobiles is still a lot harder for an individual. Not many even want to try it. The problems can be grouped as:
- Look & Feel Factor (Graphics, Visualization)
- Accessibility (Bandwidth, time, hard to surf)
- Not enough Good Content (Not much content available)
- Not relevant to me (Content not specific to an individual's interest)
- Ignorance (User doesn't know how to access and get content specific to his interest)
People might know of google's, yahoo's or msn's web portal but majority of the people just even don't know the WAP URL of these content providers. Business power houses are trying to create a separate domain .MOBI to solve that problem. But in my view it will create a far complex fragmentation. Industry has the money to spend to create the same content multiple times and duplicate it. But individuals who write blogs, make personal websites even want their content to be made available on the mobile.
My personal view is that the .MOBI may solve the brand problem of the big businesses but it will still not bring the benefits of internet onto the mobile world.
There exist a large number of WAP sites, but not many people know about it. A lot of companies did sprung up who provided personalized menus, favourites of WAP URL's which tried to reduce the number of clicks and improve accessibility to the wireless content. The WAP pages even suffered from the Look and Feel factor. With XHTML, the visualization has improved a lot and one can view web like pages on the mobile, but accessibility is still poor. Finding content relevant to an individual is still a lot harder.
SMS based content has been a lot popular even with a bad look and feel factor but a very good accessibility factor. Both the online world and offline world together have played a significant factor in popularising SMS based content and removing even the Ignorance factor to some extent. Everything has been SMS enabled from emails to bank accounts. But SMS has its own problems, the biggest being spam.
Mobile Portals deployed at the wireless carrier solve the accessibility problem by making available specifically targetted content to the general user. One can find richer content varying from news, live sports updates, weather etc. But still the homogenity and wide variety of content that's available on the internet is missing in the mobile world. If one is reading a CNN breaking story update and is interested to know more, he is just helpless. The full story is not just available or he needs to search for that full story. There exists this fragmentation where the mobile world is not homogeneously integrated with the wired internet.
One can argue that with advanced networks like 3G and advanced smart phones - look and feel and accessibility factor will just fade away. And the same content as available on the web will be browsable with desktop experience directly on the phone. But does this guarantee that users will still browse content on mobile phones? Companies in the past have made available internet on Television and other such devices. Media gateways already have access to internet. But all such devices are not used for browsing content. Each of these devices serve a well defined purpose.
Mobile phones are personal communication devices, and just mimicking and making available internet content on such devices will not solve the purpose. What is needed is a way where specific content which interests a user can be delivered to the user with the best experience without breaking the homogenity of the internet.
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