S60 Open to new features

The browser group's expert on the latest and greatest around the web is Franklin Davis. He's busy enough with his browser that I can't get him to post anything. (In fact, you may have noticed I can't get anybody to post anything, in spite of the size of the cash prizes available.) Nevertheless, here are some of his latest links:

In Web browser go to http://google.com/m/products and download free Google Maps for Mobile, and Gmail.

Open http://www.operamini.com/ to get our main competitor: Opera Mini!

On your desktop:

http://jaiku.com is a nice social tool -- post your latest thoughts or status for your friends, and see what they're doing. S60 client available.

http://nokia.com/betalabs has the latest betas from Nokia.

http://flickr.com/nokia lets you configure your phone to upload photos to flickr.

http://nokia.com/podcasting is a nice podcasting app.

http://nokia.com/maps is the latest free Smart2Go map program from Nokia.

--Franklin

(after further reflection, maybe it's because of the size of the cash prizes that I can't convince anyone to post anything... -p)

Wow, now The Register, no fan of widgets before, points out that "... the arrival of 'widgets' is further proof that the entire mobile industry is a rudderless ship furiously innovating in circles."

They don't know the half of it. Contrary to most astronomical opinion, there used to be a nice planet between Mars and Jupiter. What nobody knows is that it (planet "Wehbqitte") was the prehistoric home of the original version of the S60 Browser Group... until... uh...oops? (It goes without saying that global warming is also our fault.)

Why is the web so popular?

I think one reason is because with a few clicks you can see how a web page is done, then with a little bit of work you can do it yourself. And you can do it yourself with the same tools you already have; the tools you used to look at it in the first place. You can start as a consumer, then almost seamlessly become a participant.

It seems to me that people want to participate, not just consume. In music, in technology, in writing, in art, in television -- there's a drive to participate. Maybe it begins in consuming; I suppose it makes sense to see what you want to get into before you get into it. I think it's inherent to drive through consuming into participating when you can.

It all depends on the tools. For a long time it was difficult to participate in music (at least some kinds of music) because the instruments were expensive and learning how to play was difficult. Then for a while playing became easier but the instruments were still somewhat expensive, and suddenly you needed other stuff, like amps and recording studios. Now all of it is accessible, and look at the explosion (I'm not talking about whatever music you don't like; I'm talking about a vast expansion of participation!)

Most of the expansion in participation has been driven by the same basic tool: the personal computer. Particularly in the web, the PC draws you from consuming to participating. It's essentially a participation magnet.

Why is this? I think it's because of openness. The PC is open, although less now than it used to be. The Web is open, and it's both open and easy to have your own website up and running even before you really know what you're doing. I think that's another key to participation -- you shouldn't have to "know what you're doing" before you get started. Some people are "know what they're doing" people, but many of us tend to be "give it a try anyway" people. Except in certain areas, of course -- skydiving comes to mind...

Buried deep in the foundation of the cellular industry, though, is the notion that a mobile user is a consumer, not a participant. We're working our way past that, but very slowly. Camera phones are -- maybe inadvertently -- a big step in the right direction, but they're not really connected to most of the rest of the software in the phone. Most important, phones don't yet take you seamlessly enough from web consumer to web participant. When was the last time you created a web site by using your mobile phone? I thought so.

When you purchase DreamWeaver and your choices are Windows, MacOS, or S60; then we'll have arrived!

For each web page you look at, how much do you actually read? Or use other than by reading? Sometimes only a fairly low percentage of a page is useful. The question, of course, is which part is useful.

Our browser works on a device where in many cases the content costs extra. If you have a phone with wifi and you're in range of a hotspot, so much the better. But for the most part mobile users pay for the data. So it would be a benefit to users if the browser was clever enough to load only the right portion of a page.

It would not, of course, be a benefit to everyone. The network operators would get less data-transfer revenue. Pages with advertising support would get fewer "eyeballs" (well, assuming the ads aren't the important portion of the page). Web designers would have another task as they designed for a browser that was going to load only parts of their pages. Users are my main concern, though.

There are some systems that already try to modify the page displayed on a mobile device, generally using a proxy server to "do something" to the content and send a smaller number of bits to the mobile user. Opera Mini, for example, is partly server-based and works pretty well. There have been (and are) other proxy-based solutions. So that particular part of the problem can be solved.

The harder problem is figuring out which parts of a given page are the important parts. It's a hard problem because it depends on a lot of things. It's not necessarily the biggest piece of text. It's not necessarily the most prominent graphic element. It might be the portion of a page containing a form, but it might just as well be just the inverse; the part of the same page that doesn't contain a form. Even assuming you could get it right for a particular set of pages in a given situation -- news pages, for example, or blog pages, or photo pages -- users differ. What's important to one might be quite different from what's important to another.

It might even vary over time. The part of page "x" important to me today might not be the same tomorrow. Worst of all, some pages really only work "unabridged", as it were. The whole thing is important, and there's no apparent range of priority; you just need the whole page.

I think this is still a solvable problem, even given all these constraints. Part of the answer lies in collaboration of the "page ranking" sort. Part of it lies in adaptability of the "smart menu" sort. Some other technologies will help, too.

The large question, of course, is whether all this effort to reduce the amount of data flowing to the mobile is, in the end, a good idea. Flat-rate data service would just simplify the whole thing, wouldn't it?

Lately I've been thinking about the limits of browsers. The limits largely live in the address bar, not the multiverse of the content area. There are all kinds of things right on the phone that you can't browse. Your contacts, for example.

What would it be like if you could browse your contact list? The way I'd want to do it would be to have a list of names, each one of which would be a link. The link wouldn't always be the same thing, though.

Some of the people in my contact list are there because of who they are, and some of them have web pages. So some of the links would be to web pages. Some of the people in my list don't have web pages, and their links would just call them, if that's mostly how I contact them, or maybe email or text them if that's what I mostly do.

Some people in list are there because of what they are. The local representative of my insurance company, for example, is there because that's his job. The link to his name on my contact page would bring me to a page about me -- policy numbers, for example, and probably contact information not just for him, but for claims.

Some items in my list aren't people at all; they're companies. In some cases what I would want to link to would be my information, in some cases information about the company, and in some cases neither. If I were to shop for a car, for example, a few salespeople might temporarily inhabit my contact list. The important thing about them would be neither their names nor their companies, but the fact that I was shopping for a car. A link to some sort of model comparison would help me find the economy-class 300 horsepower, 200 mile-per-hour, 100 mile-per-gallon luxury SUV sports bus convertible I was looking for (see, this is why I hate shopping for cars...).

The point is that if you think of various kinds of information in your phone as browsable, categories start to blur. A contact can be many different things. Browsing encompasses all of them, and more. As David Weinberger says, Everything is Miscellaneous!