So said Michael Osborn (Times Newspaper) yesterday at the Mobile Internet Portal Strategies (MIPS) 08 conference. What a great phrase! It reflects an interesting aspect of the tensions in the changing digital landscape. Clearly, a lot of mobile users are using Google to find stuff, which might well include content on the Times mobile site. But, if your monetisation strategy is using mobile ads, then Google might be ‘eating your lunch,’ which, according to Michael, is a common expression in the media world.

At MIPS, David Cushman pushed out an interesting term - ‘the because effect‘ - which is all about making money because of content, but not from the content. For example, giving away a CD might generate more sales for concert tickets and other merchandise.

I think that this extends to conversation, although not in a direct monetary sense. I wrote in one of my slides that ‘conversation pulls.’ In other words, you can attract users to your site because of the conversation, even though the attracted users might not participate in it. Think of it as the ‘huddle effect’ - if you see a group of people in the street huddling around, you’re going to be tempted to go look, even though you might not join in whatever it is they’re doing. This is nothing new. It’s the original swarming brought to our attention by Rheingold in Smart Mobs. However, the use of conversation as an attractor in terms of a design strategy is compelling. We were all at MIPS to talk about strategies.

If you’re going to use conversation to pull users, then make sure that the conversation is an open as possible and that you create as many jump-off and jump-on points as possible. Again, this is counter the instincts of certain corporate mentalities out there - ‘no jumping off, no openness!’ However, that’s how Web 2.0 works. You can get as much value, if not more, from the outbound links as the inbound ones.

During the panel session about on-device portals, Vaseem Ahmed (Vodafone) confirmed what we all suspected, which is that an ODP is good for immediacy. With content being downloaded in the background into the ODP client, it’s there immediately when the user next opens the app. When I asked how immediacy compared with richness, then Vaseem spoke of immediacy as the key experience, although for the heavy content users, richness on the high end devices was important.

Miles Ross (IPC Media) made it clear that for a media company without a means to preload an ODP onto a device (which is what Vodafone do) then it’s not sensible to use an ODP. There are simply too many failure points in getting the application onto the devices. Not necessarily so for certain niche audiences, as one panelist revealed (sorry, his name not on the program). In supporting music festivals with an ODP solution, he talked of a nearly 90% success rate in getting festival goers to download an ODP client.

In the ODP session, none of the panelists (which included giants Nokia and Vodafone) were clear about how new browser technologies (e.g. AIR or Google Gears) might alter the ODP versus browser debate. This goes to show how framing affects thinking. If you take out the words browser and ODP and talk about, say, ‘immediate access to content’, then it doesn’t matter whether the application is called an ODP or a browser - or a widget. This is symptomatic of an industry that has been plagued for too long by a neglect of the user experience. That’s why, nearly 10 years after the first mobile portal was shown at Cannes 98 (Zingo, which I designed for Lucent Technologies) we are still trying to solve basic problems (e.g. downloads) to do with supporting a decent user experience. That’s also why my presentation was mostly about the user experience.

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