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Here's an excellent podcast: Jon Udell interviews Dr. Joel Selanikio about the potential and uses of the dominant developing-world computing platform (the mobile phone) and the dominant communication protocol there (SMS). I owe Mike Rowehl thanks for posting this interview on his blog.
Selaniko is a physician working on public health and technological issues in the developing world. He and Udell muse about SMS as a communication system for physicians with no other access to medical communications. Why not, they say, write a small application that aggregates SMS messages into a larger whole -- such as, for example, a treatment protocol or even a paper in a medical journal. Ten or fifteen years ago we got along with similar transmission speeds and processing power.
This raises an interesting point: if you were to create such a program, it would probably display something like pages of text. It might even have some form of hyperlinking. Except for the fact that it doesn't use HTTP, and probably wouldn't use HTML tagging (too heavyweight), what you'd have would be a browser.
Similarly, think about the other end of the spectrum. HTTP and HTML won't be around forever any more than token ring networks, CP/M, or Wordstar. But the notion of a browser will probably transcend the "plumbing" simply because the ability to open remote documents that contain some kind of hyperlinking is so powerful.
Of course, I'm radically simplifying the idea of a "browser" here. I dunno; what's the basic set of capabilities that makes a piece of software clearly a browser, and how independent are those capabilities from communication protocol and content formatting?
Comments
Happy you enjoyed the discussion as well. As far as what makes a browser a browser, unfortunately I think we're getting further and further away from device and client independent information access. Sure, HTML is the spec things are built on top of, but the minimal platform is really HTML + CSS + Javascript. Much of the web is actually moving away from pages of information as the base unit of interchange, the base unit is the application as a whole. And while the proliferation of web services and data APIs mean that the backend data isn't trapped in the application it started in, it also doesn't mean that it's directly accessible from other devices or clients.
That really brings up an interesting question in general about data access from mobile devices, browser or no. Much of what I've been working on at Mowser is focused on making the pages of HTML content readable from a mobile device. But longer term I think the question shifts from making HTML accessible to hooking together existing applications and adding the right mix of services and presentation for mobile. How that evolves, and if it's a generic service or a set of services all operating independently is a part of the vision I've been struggling with.
Posted by: Mike Rowehl | February 25, 2008 02:50 PM"Ten or fifteen years ago we got along with similar transmission speeds and processing power."
Maybe so, but our messages were not limited to 128 characters or whatever the SMS limitation is.
I'm very skeptical of using SMS for this, given the ludicrously high data cost and low message size limitations. A phone that has access to SMS **usually** also has access to at least WAP and eMail. I don't see any reason why, say, a threaded newsgroup (or ListServe) style application wouldn't work.
Of course, by Western standards, all of these are steps backwards in technological terms. Given that the mobile phone is taking off so rapidly in places like Africa, I doubt very much that they will remain as low-tech as a simple SMS only phone for long ... if, indeed, they are already so limited.
So why not extend the idea of a Wiki to the cell phone?
Posted by: Steve | February 25, 2008 09:37 AM