Introduction
Fellow Web 2.0 Workgroup member Ajit Joakar has been creating an extensive series of posts over at his blog Open Gardens about Mobile Web 2.0 and how it is defined as well as how it compares to or differs from Web 2.0. Ajit’s work, which is very well thought out and truly comprehensive got me thinking about a presentation I gave last year at the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet which is a part of George Washington University. I was part of a panel that was discussing mobile technology and how it could be used in the political realm.
When I gave the presentation it was estimated at that time (September 2005) that there were approximately 1.7 billion mobile handsets in use. By the end of December 2005 that number was thought to have exceeded 2 billion! By sheer rate of growth alone the mobile handset is the unparalleled winner when it comes to rapid adoption of a technology by the people of this planet. So too is the mobile phone a great technological equalizer for where the phone goes (into new communities) the rate of change in other areas increases quite dramatically and the socio-economic status of individuals that have acquired phones increases radically in comparison to economically matched peers that have not been fortunate enough to acquire phones.
The poorer a region is - both technologically and economically, the greater the impact mobile phones have on society, and in a few scattered places around the world where mobile phones have been adopted enterprising individuals have quite literally capitalized on their acquisition of a phone to vault themselves upwards economically by creating businesses out of letting their less fortunate contemporaries rent the phones - in essence becoming a one man, one phone telco.
Ray Anderson, CEO of the mobile content company Bango related to me his experience providing food and medicines to people in Timbuktu (yes, it really exists). According to Ray they have 3 things in commerce; goats, bundles of wood and prepaid wireless cards. You can guess which commands top dollar. And if you asked why in the world people living in such a primitive society would want or need a cell phone you wouldn’t be alone. I did.
It turns out that their reasons are not much different than ours although there is virtually no social use, people can suddenly get timely service by crossing a gap between locations that would have taken hours or days. In a place where the fastest means of transportation is on foot most of the time, the ability to transmit or receive a message from someone miles away is life altering.
So what does this have to do with Mobile 2.0?
Whereas Mobile Web 2.0 is all about the advanced capabilities associated with a specific subset of systems within a mobile device and particularly centered around some kind of web enabled interface Mobile 2.0 is more about the entirety of the device and its myriad and highly differentiated possibilities for interaction with the end user. In a nutshell, Mobile 2.0 is the superset of life altering functionality conveyed by a functioning mobile phone to that phone’s owner.
Mobile 2.0 is not device dependent. There is no measuring stick of functionality that is a determinant as to whether or not a mobile phone is or is not a Mobile 2.0 device. All functioning phones today are Mobile 2.0. It isn’t what the phone does, so much as what is being done with the phone that has lead us to Mobile 2.0. This definition has the advantage of extensibility - a developing country experiences Mobile 2.0 by virtue of the changing socio economic status of those that own phones. In Japan or Korea Mobile 2.0 can be seen in the development of entirely new forms of entertainment oriented content for display on mobile devices and in the US we can see the birth of Mobile 2.0 in the roll-out of presence enabled services and phone-based navigational services.
Unlike Web 2.0 or its extension to the mobile web, perhaps properly called WAP 2.0 or 2.0 Micro, Mobile 2.0 is almost as much about the end user as it is about the device or the service whereas Web 2.0 doesn’t exist with out the combination of the two. In a similar vein, Mobile 2.0 is morphologically amorphous - the form of the device is constantly changing and shifting. As Walter Mossberg said at a keynote last year, Mobile is the most important new technology but we have no idea what it is going to become.
I think this last is a very important point. While we might be amazed at the features or functionality that people are getting out of the PC and the broadband network these days, we’re still very much constrained by the form of the device, the form of the interface, the limitations of the network and the input and output devices that make up the medium. Not so Mobile 2.0 where the limits to what this device can be are as wildly varied as one could possibly imagine. Witness Nokia’s take on the technology, both in regards to the devices that are actually for sale and especially in their stable of future-oriented developmental devices.
In the future, Mobile 2.0 devices might be built into our clothing, our physical environment, or even, in the form of things like “smart dust” in the vary air we breath. For all that, Mobile 2.0 might even be cybernetic – that is part of our physical bodies. I’d seriously consider having the ability to instantaneously communicate with people on the other side of the globe physically implanted in my body just as I would love IR visual capabilities or super-acute hearing.
(Author’s note: this is the first in a multi-part series on Mobile 2.0. The next segment will focus on the state of the technology today, it’s primary uses and why this matters. The third and final part of this review will focus on where this technology will lead in this author’s opinion and what form the device will take in the next decade.)
It seems like what you (and Ajit Joakar) call Mobile 2.0, is indeed a senrendipitous concept of technology.
I don’t see much difference between Mobile 2.0 and the search for killer applications in different countries that mobile carriers and hardware producers are doing since the beginning of mobile era.
The point is that now our technology is being discovered (or I’d better say pushed from us) by countries radically different from ours (african nations above all), with a completely different background and social construction of technological artifacts. That’s why what is happening now is that our products in their hands are being used in ways we couldn’t have imagined before.
But this is not about mobiles, or wireless revolution, or at least not only about that. It’s about giving people some technological artifact that doesn’t belong to their culture and watching them bend it for their use, a use that will never be good for us.
The same thing will probably happen with low cost computers (may they be Negroponte’s one or else).
[...] Link: Mobile 2.0 IS NOT Web 2.0 [...]
Mobilit√© 2.0…
Alors que le W3C publie “les meilleures pratiques du web mobile, version 1.0“, voil√† que beaucoup s’agitent autour de l’id√©e d’un web mobile 2.0. Popularis√© par MobileCrunch, le TechCrunch qui s’int√©resse aux nouvea…
What I see as a hindrance in the mobile world, as opposed to the web, is the lack of open standards and tools to build your own applications. Web 2.0 is based on user intelligence instead of technologies, i.e. by giving users smart tools that enable them to apply human semantics to information provided, you get a more intelligent web. This can only be done in a massive (thus useful) way with open standards and protocols thar are inclusive and inviting to everyone. Now, as I see it, this ‘open-source’ story is an aspect seriously lacking from mobile platforms. What do you think about that?
Mobile web 2.0 is really a wolf in sheep’s guise. Wolf is the web 2.0 and sheep is mobile. We are seeing the same concepts roughly put together with very little focus on the mobile user
[...] And oh btw: one of the features I appreciate the most is the ‘one touch button’ to switch from music listening to an incoming call and the ability to create a ringtone from any song in my library. You won’t get bored with this phone. Nokia is listening to it’s users, mobile 2.0 is definately here… Driewerf hoera! 3G, Analysis, apple, Cool Devices, ethnographics, Fun, iphone, ipod, mobile 2.0, Mobile Apps, Mobile Content, Mobile Lifestyle, mobile music, Mobile OS, Mobile RSS, mobile web, Moblog, n91, nokia, Nokia N91, podcasts, s60, social media, usability, user experience, wi fiSocial BookmarkingThese icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
Understanding Mobile 2.0…
Written by Rudy De Waele of m-trends.org and edited by Richard MacManus. This kicks off a mini-series of posts on the topic of Mobile 2.0, which we will explore on Read/WriteWeb this week. On the eve of Le Web 3……
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[...] Oliver Starr writes that Mobile 2.0 isn’t Web 2.0. Oliver mentions the influence of Ajit Jaoker’s attempts to define “Mobile 2.0″, which I discussed in a previous post. The essence of Web 2.0 is really the evolution from a publishing-centric Web to a services-centric Web. When the Web started out, we went there only to view documents. Today, we can use it for Word-processing, banking, blogging, social-networking, project management and many other Web-bound services. Part of the trend is that our personal data flows into the Web more and more. We are no longer just passive consumers of information. Ajit’s concept is essentially a mobilized Web 2.0. If we focus for a moment on the characteristics of Web 2.0 services, then let’s turn to the most recent edition of Entrepreneur, which in the article “It Takes 2.0 to Tango” says: [...]
[...] Mobile 2.0 isn’t Web 2.0 notes Oliver Starr [...]
[...] Google’s Big Idea by Russell Buckley Mobile web 2.0: Web 2.0 and its impact on the mobility and digital convergence by Ajit Jaokar Mobile 2.0 IS NOT Web 2.0 by Oliver Starr at MobHappy About context and the mobile web by Rudy De Waele at gotomobile.com What is “Mobile 2.0″ (Beta) by Dan Appelquist Daniel Appelquist on Mobile 2.0, and views on a different kind of Mobile 2.0 by C. Enrique Ortiz the mobile designer by Kelly Goto My Mobile 2.0 Manifesto by Fabrizio Capobianco 10 Things I Learned at Mobile 2.0 by Brian Fling Carnival of the Mobilists - a group of bloggers, writing weekly on mobility [...]