Opera has released a report on the state of the mobile web. And considering the company claims more than 44 million users for its Opera Mini cellphone web browser, Opera's in as good a position as any company to report on mobile web usage.
There are two trends that are particularly noteworthy. First, 77% of all traffic was to full web pages, not stripped down mobile pages. This probably shouldn't be that surprising, since Opera Mini renders full pages pretty quickly and lets users zoom in and out to read the fine print. And while WAP might have been pretty exciting a few years ago when there wasn't as much rich media content on the web, and when mobile internet connections were significantly slower, those days are long gone.
The second trend is a bit more surprising. 40% of worldwide traffic was directed to social networks. In some countries including the US, South Africa, and Indonesia, that number was as high as 60%. Now, it's not like we didn't know that social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and Bebo were popular. We just didn't figure people would be spending half of their mobile web browsing time visiting them.
What sites do you visit regularly with your mobile web browser?
Mowser is a tool that helps you cram full web pages onto the tiny web browser on your cellphone. Just go to the Mowser web site, type in the URL you want to read, and Mowser will strip away all the unnecessary visual information that looks fine on a desktop web browser but bogs down your cellphone.
Beattie reports that his company has been having a difficult time raising funds and has been making very little money from advertising. Rather than regroup, Beattie is giving up because he says he doesn't believe in the "mobile web" anymore.
That's kind of sad, because the service was fairly useful if you've got an old school browser and an old school phone, something interesting is happening with the mobile web. Cellphone users either don't bother signing up for web service at all, or if they do they're starting to flock towards devices like the iPhone which can support full web pages without any Mowser-style squashing. The interesting thing about products like Mowser is that they're designed for yesterday's mobile web, not tomorrow's. If Beattie had launched his company in 2004 instead of 2007 it might have been successful. But today the distinctions between the mobile web and the full web are starting to blur, which leaves services like Mowser out in the cold.
There are a ton of Google services that are optimized for mobile web browsers, including the company's search page, RSS reader, and email client. But Google has yet to release a response to Yahoo! Go, Yahoo!'s mobile version of its web application web suite. So developer Bryan Burkholder decided to put one together all by his lonesome. He calls it Google2Go.
The application works with pretty much every Google mobile service, including:
Google web, image, and local search
Gmail
Google Calendar
Google Reader
Google Docs
Picasa
Google News
Google Notes
There's also support for Amazon, eBay, Weather.com, Wikipedia, and Dictionary.com. Right now Google2Go requires a Windows Mobile 6 Professional device with a touchscreen, but Burkholder plans to add support for other devices soon.
Many web sites (including Download Squad) have an uncanny way of appearing attractive whether you view them on a full sized desktop web browser or a mobile web browser on your tiny cellphone screen. But if you don't have the time, energy, or programming expertise to create a mobile version of your web site, or if you want to read someone else's web site on your cellphone, there are a few easy ways to create cellphone-friendly versions of any site.
A while back we looked at MoFuse, a free service that strips away all of the unnecessary content on any site and gives you a mobile version optimized for small screens and low bandwidth internet connections. But you can achieve the same results using Google Reader.
All you have to do is add an RSS feed to the end of this URL: http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/. For example, http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://www.downloadsquad.com/category/social-software/rss.xml will bring up a basic page with a list of Download Squad stories about social software. For some reason our main RSS feed doesn't seem to work, so this solution doesn't appear to be one size fits all. But it only takes a few seconds to find out if your site's feed will work. If it does, you can give your blog visitors easy access to a mobile version of your page, or you can create a series of bookmarks for your favorite web sites on your mobile phone.
Ever run across a website that just looks like crap on a mobile web browser? Download Squad is optimized for viewing on a small screen, but many web sites aren't. Sure, you could spend a lot of time tweaking a site's style sheet, but there's an easier way.
MoFuse lets you make a mobile version of pretty much any site. The entire process basically boils down to:
Create an account
Name your site
Enter the RSS feed
Tweak if you like
In other words, it takes about a minute to create a custom, mobile version of any web site. While the service is great for web publishers (WordPress users can even add auto-redirect tags to their site so that users on mobile browsers will be sent to the MoFuse version), you can also use it to make mobile versions of websites that you don't own. Tired of struggling to read your favorite site on your Treo? Just mobilize it.
But there's one potential problem with that last part. MoFuse also lets you monetize mobile sites by placing AdSense or AdMob content on mobile pages. If you're placing advertising on your own site, that's great. But if you're putting ads on a site registered to someone else and then publicizing and profiting from the feed? Well, that could cause some legal issues, don't you think?
Opera has released a report on the state of the mobile web. And considering the company claims more than 44 million users for its Opera Mini cellphone web browser, Opera's in as good a position as any company to report on mobile web usage.
