Like The Cure’s “A Forest” and its wailing lament “again and again and again…” that’s what all this Web Mobile 2.0 whatsit feels like - a repeat of old mistakes. Before we go as high as a kite riding the wind from “the blogosphere”, let’s get back to basics.
What happened to WAP? We started off with HDML-blah and no one wanted to create sites in another language. “We need HTML” came the cries. “Look at the success of iMode. It uses HTML.” All sensible comments I guess, except iMode from O2 showed us that we need something more than just a nice mark-up language to make this all work. Of course, what we really needed was tools, not mark-up languages, but tech-heads - myself included - rarely get this.
So, WAP became WAP 2.0 and HDML died a death - good riddance. Now we can use HTML - mobile profile, or, in quite a few browsers, just plain old (new) XHTML. There are even mobiles that supposedly allow us to surf any site on a mobile. And yet, where are the sites? Nearly every website out there does NOT have a mobile-friendly version. Apparently, the solution is the semantic web: web 3.0 or something.
Well, we can debate the whys and why nots about this forever, as so many pundits do. However, one thing comes to mind. Like anything in life, if it’s easy to do, it stands a better chance of being done. There must be some law out there that says this - and, it ought to be taught to every student in technology and design. Such “obvious” things are seldom taught. Therefore - and it’s only a theory - if it’s easy to create a mobile site and publish it, then we might have more sites. That’s why I like Zinadoo. I got an invite to try it and published my own mobile site in about 1 minute! Great stuff Zinadoo!
7 responses so far ↓
1 Martin // May 29, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Hi Paul,
How does it compare to winksite ? - which is also fairly easy to set up a mobile website ?
Martin
2 Paul G // May 29, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Hi Martin,
Winksite is great - I already use it to mobilize my blog. However, I think that Winksite is massively over-complicated. The dashboard has a huge array of settings and bits and bobs - very confusing for the absolute tech-novice, which must be the goal of any site that claims to be “mobilising the masses”. Like I say, tech-heads want features whereas normal people want results and an easy life. That’s where Zinadoo is yards ahead. It’s more like what you’d expect those clever socks over at 37signals to come up with (I LOVE those guys).
Now, the question is…why doesn’t T-Mobile have a wonderful hosted easy-as-a-b-c tool to allow users to host their own websites? This is your bread and butter really - “web and walk” taken up a notch! You can add in a whole bunch of incentives, like favourable data rates for other T-Mobile users, some funky text voting apps and stuff like that.
3 ken // May 30, 2007 at 3:41 am
Hi Paul:
Just wondering if you had tried Alex Kings mobile plugin for Wordpress..?!?
http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
If so, any comments for better or worse?
4 Grace // May 30, 2007 at 10:15 am
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the blog and glad you like Zinadoo! Our ease of use is something we pride ourselves on and what we believe it to be our main differentiating factor, so it’s great when we hear that our users agree! So hopefully we’re well on the road to “Mobilising the Massesâ€!
Grace
5 Now onto Version4 « nubiq // Jun 1, 2007 at 11:23 am
[…] Paul Golding […]
6 Paul G // Jun 1, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Hi Ken
No, I didn’t try Alex’s WAP plug-in and couldn’t immediately find it at the link. I tried http://www.lesterchan.net WAP plug-in and couldn’t seem to get it to work. Actually, it’s not really a plug-in. It’s a set of PHP scripts that go straight into the main WP folder.
However, none of these options are user friendly and offer me a way to customise the WAP site. That’s what I like about Zinadoo. It’s a cinch to use.
Paul G
7 Jag // Jun 3, 2007 at 1:55 pm
My site uses the Alex King plugin for Wordpress - and it works a treat. Have been using it for at least a couple of years now.
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