Some good did come out of .mobi in the form of Mobiforge, its developer arm, which created a large number of resources for mobile web developers. A blog post there says business will carry on as usual. Hopefully that’s the case.

And in case you were wondering, my favorite .mobi site, flowers.mobi — you remember, the one that was purchased for $200,000 in 2006 and was supposed to be developed into a legit site with “relevant content” — is still just a parked domain with ads. And it’s still not compliant with .mobi’s rules for its sites. Big surprise there.

It’s another example of what I labeled co-browsing a while back: following along on your mobile or PC while watching a sporting event live or on TV. Football3s runs through a Flash-based interface, so it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll be seeing it on mobiles very soon, but this is just the tip of the iceberg for this sort of thing, with a huge number of potential applications — particularly for mobile users.

Along similar lines, a couple of casinos here in Vegas are offering in-game betting via dedicated mobile devices, which even let people wager on the outcome of specific plays.

(As an aside, I heard about Football3s via the wonderful Football Ramble podcast, which is definitely worth the download if you like football and have a sense of humor.)

If you want to donate and you’re in the US, you can text HAITI to 90999, and a $10 donation to the Red Cross will get added on to your mobile bill.

Typically they invoke a scenario in which somebody makes a call from a noisy location (pub, supermarket, etc.), then the person they’re calling gets annoyed and says to call back later, then they call from a landline at home and everything is super-awesome because it’s quiet and the calls are clear. I’ve seen some ads in the past from landline operators taking shots at VoIP call quality, but not mobile calls — perhaps because many of them here also own mobile networks. Maybe this is BT’s way of expressing regret for dumping BT Cellnet several years ago.

ESPN has now set up a college football site dedicated to co-browsing during games called Section 140. ESPN bills Section 140 as:

# A new MOBILE destination to cheer, comment and maybe talk a little trash with other College Football fans from all across the country.
# A MOBILE sounding board where you can join the conversation from anywhere during the game.
# A real-time, MOBILE place to meet like-minded and not so like-minded fans while your teams are on the field.
# A place to interact with ESPN College Football writers in the Virtual Press Box.

They’ve set up a schedule for games they’re broadcasting and staffing the site with their online writers, who will be there to interact with fans (who can of course interact with each other as well) during the games. Interesting link between the real and online worlds, and something I think we’ll definitely see more of.

My own Twitter and Facebook feeds tend to take on a life of their own during Texas Longhorn games in a sort of ad-hoc dedicated social network. I think it’s cool to see ESPN try and capitalize on this with something of their own.

Any other good examples of co-browsing destinations out there?

I’d been thinking about barcodes for a few days when I went to my local megamultiplex to see a film, and ran into this on the front door. That seemed rather serendipitous. It illustrated the utility of barcodes by taking me to a mobile site for the forthcoming Tim Burton flick 9, where I was able to download a trailer and whatnot. But it also illustrates some of the problems of barcodes: it says to send a text to a shortcode at the bottom. As the text should say “READER”, obviously they’re going to try to send you a code reader. But if you need to get the reader, and have to send a text, would it be better just to get a text with the link to the site? Furthermore, if you’re a normob and confronted with this poster, are you really going to know what to do with it? I doubt it.

Furthermore, the growth of QWERTY devices makes the entry of URLs slightly less painful, and mobile-focused URL shorteners are emerging alongside short-code services to make things even easier. And if the “shortcut” requires users to download and install a barcode reader app, it’s not much of a shortcut.

So it’s a bit hard to see a bright future for barcodes that are nothing more than encoded URLs, isn’t it? Barcodes can be used for a lot more than that — the film I went to see when I ran into the poster was Food, Inc., which got me thinking about how nice it would be to be able to use barcodes to find out more information about the provenance of food items, as lots of people have thought. I think it’s these sorts of applications that, if anything, will draw users to mobile barcodes, rather than URL shortcuts.

What are your thoughts on mobile barcodes? And do you have any cool examples of how they’re being used?

Keep that in mind the next time somebody tells you people don’t like to download apps on their phone.

And remember Buckley’s Law #31:

Citizens will download applications, providing it’s very clear what the application does and what the benefits of using it are.

As well as its corollary, Longino Revised Statute 31.31/b:

Citizens will download applications, provided it’s truly easy, fast, and rewarding.

Nokia announced the SU-7 Image Frame a few years ago, but the price of the frame was pretty steep and finding a reasonably priced way to keep the SIM in the frame alive wasn’t very easy. T-Mobile’s on the right path, with the frame at $100, but $10 per month service might still be high.

I doubt I’d ever use one of these, but I can see grandmothers around the world loving it, and looking forward to getting new photos and updates from their kids and grandkids.

By enabling better experiences with the services your customers already use, you’ll create a much more favorable impression of your brand than if you try and force them into closed and substandard services of your own.

I wrote that a couple of months ago in a post about some services Nokia had released as a part of their new internet services strategy. The basic gist was that one of the services — Nokia Email — didn’t work (though I later got it going) and a couple of others, Nokia Chat and Sync on Ovi, were too closed off to be of much use.

Last week, the company announced Nokia Friend View, “a location and micro-blogging service”. Think Twitter with a map display. Yet again, it’s sort of interesting, but instead of adding functionality on to the slightly popular Twitter service, it’s completely separate. In fact, it’s so walled off that it won’t even import your buddies from Nokia Chat.

But the bigger issue is, again, Nokia seems to assume that owners of its devices are only friends with other Nokia owners. As a friend of mine put it, it’s for viewing your “Nokia friends”, not all your friends. Based on all these experiences, all I can gather from Nokia’s service strategy is that it’s attempting to take the walled garden from operators and replace it with a walled garden from Nokia. But closing off those services — especially social services — to non-Nokia users will ensure they’ll fail.

One of the issues with Nokia Chat is that although it’s built on Jabber, it doesn’t exactly act like it. It won’t let users log in with their existing Jabber ID, they must get a Nokia-specific one, and a lot of the added extra bits, like the location functionality, is available only to other Nokia Chat users. It’s walled off, instead of being made available to share with people on other Jabber systems. Because, again, apparently if you own a Nokia, all your friends and anybody you’d want to talk to should own a compatible Nokia device. Friend View is similar in that it’s not interoperable with existing microblogging services, whether that’s simple cross-posting or deeper integration with something like Twitter, or by following standards like those being mulled over by the XMPP community.

What’s next, a voice calling service that only lets you connect to other Nokia handset owners?

Once more, with feeling: closed social services won’t fly. Even when you’ve got 40% market share. If you force users to choose between your closed service and the open service their friends are already using, you’re going to lose.

So if I go look at somebody, like, say, Whatleydude, Mippin will tell me we’ve got medium similarity, and then I can choose to follow him, or check out his shared stories or the sites he reads. Nifty, and a great way to discover new mobile content.

They also made this amusing video to explain it a bit more:

Good job to the team at Mippin, and I look forward to what they come up with next!