Social Bookmarks for the Mobile Web
The mobile web has been discussed by web designers and user experience experts for quite some time now. But does it actually exist?
Owning a web-capable PDA (with Opera and MSIE) and a mobile phone with an XHTML Browser, theoretically I have everything I need to spend hours and hours online, wherever I am.
Yet, what’s lacking is the awareness of good web content and services, prepared for mobile use. As far as portals, web directories and search engines are concerned, the mobile web feels like the “actual web” felt about 1995. Think Yahoo! web directory (not Dmoz.org), AltaVista (not Google) and private link pages like “my top 10 favorite web links”.
del.icio.us for mobile users
We have del.icio.us for social bookmarking and we have mobilicio.us, a great mobile HTML interface for del.icio.us. But we don’t have a way yet to find web pages that are usable on a PDA or mobile phone.
Where is the wisdom of the crowds when it comes to mobile web social bookmarking? There are some mobile URLs in del.icio.us already, but they are burried among “classical” WWW URLs, tagged with tags like pda, mobile, handheld or wap. But all of these tags are frequently used to tag URLs about PDAs, hendhelds, mobile phones, mobility and WAP.
Please, use the ‘formobile’ tag
I know, trying to make people use tags in a certain way is almost useless. I’ll try anyway.
If you have any interest in collecting URLs of web sites that are optimized for any type of mobile device (i.e. handheld, PDA, mobile phone), feel free to add these URLs to del.icio.us and tag them (amongst others) with the tag
I’ll go and track the development of the wisdom by counting the number of URLs there day by day 
. Currently it’s 55 formobile URLs.
Please leave comments here in case you have an opinion on this topic.
2 Kommentare
Füge unten Deinen Kommentar hinzuThere are two matters that I’d like to remark:
First, I think that the mobile web actually DOES exist, indeed! Sadly, suitable devices to use it, i.e. modern 3G phones with affordable price plans, seem to be missing yet. At least here in Germany.
But there are already some useful web sites and mobile applications available, e.g. Google Maps.
Furthermore, the mobile web will prevail if and only if there will be no unnecessary barriers to the user, like special URLs for mobile sites. Thus typing in a “classic” WWW URL on your phone should automatically lead you to a site that is suitable for mobile devices. If my assumption should become true, it would also make the “formobile” tag obsolete.
David, I have to agree. Special URLs for mobile versions shouldn’t be our aim.
But for the time beeing, it’s far from self-evident that users of mobile devices will find something useful under any given WWW URL. And this won’t be the case for a long time.
I tried to emphasize the problem of lacking awareness on the user side. User currently cannot expect to find a useful mobile offering under any given URL. And since it hurts many users financially, the eagerness to find good offerings the hard ways is pretty small.
As long as it’s not self-evident to offer a mobile web site, organizations should take this as an invitation to make their services easier to find. For users, it’s simply the invitation to make more use of a web 2.0 best practice.
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