Fighting lack of sleep, I attended the Local and Mobile Search panel this morning at PubCon. It gave a good overview of what you should look for when moving your site to the mobile web, offering some good overview tips and tricks on site design, function and layout. 30 minutes in to the presentations, however, a man by the name of Eswar Priyadarshan demoed the technology behind their new product called GetMobile. In an entry on his blog, Eswar explains what GetMobile does.
One of our key goals is to enable publishers to rapidly mobilize. To this end, we provide a capability that we refer to as “Juicing”: the dynamic, automatic extraction and mobile transcoding of existing wired Web content. What separates our Juicer from most other technologies out there with similar goals is (a) the extraction of Wired content can not only occur based on HTML markup and structure but also by where the content is located visually on the page and (b) we have the full ability to run Javascript/Ajax code on the page prior to extracting the content. What the Juicer does is make it possible for our client sites to essentially treat their wired Web site as a dynamic data source – we have found this to be very powerful since clients are not required to provide us with specialized content feeds or the like – their Web site is their virtual feed to the Juicer.It's pretty heavy, so I'll make it a little easier to understand. Basically, you feed your full blown website in to the GetMobile "juicer," and it runs some complicated algorithms and processing, eventually generating a mobile friendly version of your site. Their processor is smart enough to recognize what portions of your site is the logo, navigation, & content, and very accurately pieces the parts together to automatically generate a mobile site. From there, you're allowed to customize your mobile site even more with colors, images & other branding elements to make the user experience match your full blown website.
It was pretty amazing, and had Mel (who was sitting next to me) ooing and aahhing during the presentation. If it works as advertised, the software takes the very complicated process of developing a mobile site and makes it about as simple designing a webpage in Dreamweaver.
As all the other presenters in the session mentioned, the mobile web is on its way to the mainstream. We're very close to a tipping point in the space, and all businesses - small and large - need to take advantage of it. Keep an eye out for GetMobile, as it makes the process of going mobile much, much easier.
I'm all for software tools, but I have to say that I've never seen a non-trivial anything go through a translator from system_a to system_b and have it work.
I've seen a lot of nice demonstrations though!
I should also note that the promise of write-once, run everywhere (which started, for me, with UCSD Pascal p-code and went all the way through C++ into Java) has never really been fulfilled.
And we all know how many 4GL's there are still out there <cricket></cricket>.
What I could see would be useful would be to take your app, run it through the blender, and see what it looks like. And then, from there, you'd have some good ideas for how to make it work well.
That would be worth a good bit of money all by itself.
-OT
Yeah, translators are always a finicky piece of software. Eswar seemed pretty confident that the system would work as advertised, but I'll be 100% convinced when I see it in action.
I've also seen a lot of people 100% convinced about a lot of things.
And yet.... :-)
-OT
I lived in Japan for a couple of years and many people there did not even own a computer. They did a lot of their surfing on their phones. It's a huge market for sure. But I wonder how things like the iPhone will affect it. It's getting to the point that you don't need a mobile version of your site if the phone browsers decide to catch up to the real world.
Good point, and one that's frequently made in Mobile development circles. There was a NYT article recently that addressed the shortcomings and future of the mobile web that you'll probably be interested in.
Here's how we addressed the issue for marketers wondering whether they needed to build a mobile web site in light of the iPhone and the changing mobile web in our (free) white paper, in the chapter called "yes, you need a mobile web site":
"1. iPhone adoption is not growing fast enough to outpace the other 200+commercially available cell phones and PDAs and justify optimization for a single device anytime soon.
2. Search engines are always concerned with providing a good userexperience for the simple user, so even when adoption rates have grown to the level of JavaScript and Adobe Flash on the desktop Web, as marketers we will still benefit from catering to users with the simplest of browsers3. From a usability standpoint, the user experience is different on amobile phone than it is on a desktop, and mobile users searchdifferently than they do otherwise. Mobile sites allow us to control that experience, and optimize for mobile, rather than web-based queries.
4. Even the iPhone has limitations with regard to displaying web content compared to web browsers, currently not supporting Flash and being delivered at dialup speeds on AT&T’s Edge Network. Both designing a web site that is accessible to mobile devices and designing a web site specifically for mobile devices would make this a non-issue.
5. Currently Google and Yahoo!'s search engines reward for having mobile content, such that the owners of mobile sites can potentially have several listings on a SERP where they wouldn't have had any placement otherwise. Given the search engines' tendency to reward sites that cater to the simple user, this factor is not likely to disappear anytime soon.
6. In terms of reputation management, if your company doesn’t have a mobile web site show up in Yahoo!’s Mobile Web Results, which company will get that first page listing? In the case of one Resolution Media client, an accessible web site did not show up, causing the user who searched on their brand to click through to a 413 error, and a Frontline article tying their brand to shady activity in Mexico did. Having mobile web sites optimized for multiple devices would have banished this negative result to the second page.Until all of these arguments disappear, it is well worth the limited resources a company needs to expend in order to develop and optimize a site for consumption on the mobile web."
Interesting. As Mr. Priyadarshan mentioned, however, there are a number of mobilizers that perform the task of making web content accessible to mobile devices available already. I think the value in this tool will be in how much easier it makes this process, while still making the content accessible to mobile search engines. Unfortunately mobile site development and mobile search optimization are rarely synonymous, so it would be very possible to create a mobile site easily while making that site invisible to search engines. It sounds like this tool is promising at least in terms of simple site development, however, so it's worth a second look when it launches. Thanks for the tip.
We should be careful in assuming the desktop user experience is the same as the mobile user experience, because they can be entirely different. There may be aspects of the desktop website that are superfluous or irrelevant to a mobile user and vice versa. For this reason and others, mobilizers like this one are almost always going to be inferior to building a separate mobile web site specifically for a mobile user.
Since this thread is more about mobile site development than mobile search optimization, I would highly recommend Mobile Web Design by Cameron Moll to anyone interested in the subject. Should help to illuminate some of the more common issues.
Best,
Bryson
I challenge them to make their site mobile friendly.
Using their tool.
Shootout, they should have a shootout. 10 tools, one website, voting.
Now that would be great linkbait!
-OT
The tool looks great. It takes a website and adapts it to mobile site. Also it gives option for users to change if the tool didn't do good job.. Waiting to see some more good things on this. I went to their site, it appears like they have lot of sites live already.
I use my mobile phone browser a fair bit:
Google mobile search
Google mobile maps
Slashdot mobile
There are others, but that probably represents 90% of my mobile browsing.
I have never clicked on an ad on a mobile site, though I will do on the regular web.
-OT
I keep coming back to mobile over and over again. Haven't worked out a plan yet, but I think it's interesting and some day soon, I plan to have a plan...
Will - after you figure out your plan for a plan, would you mind sending me a copy? ;)
Plenty of CMSs already produce text-only versions of sites.
I don't think we should see the mobile sites in the same light as we see the "normal" versions on the web. As anyone who ever tried to load a site on a phone browser knows, the same rules don't apply, and if you just "translate" a site, it won't work for sure.
Mobile sites must be adapted to mobile devices. Sure the iPhone lets you click and zoom in and then zoom back... but why should you have to do that?
Most people don't yet search on mobile. They play games or send email. And in my opinion search on mobile devices will grow more in conjunction with maps. If you're on the go, you need a powerful local search tool, not a generic one, when you look for a restaurant, a taxi or where movies are playing near you.
Ps: why is there a copy of this post on: https://www.seogear.com/2007/12/05/some-tips-from-pubcon
-on-how-to-get-your-site-optimized-for-the-mobile-web/
The total amount of web users is steadily growing, and mobile will inevitably take a larger and larger share as devices and users become more sophisticated.
having a mobile-friendly site will become more and more important, but as devices become more powerful the amount of work needed to create a mobile-friendly site will decrease. I (wild guess) imagine that eventually most sites will display perfectly well on mobile devices without the developer having done any specific modifications to cater to such devices...
In the meantime, however, there will be a period where having a mobile version of your site is vital - and we're probably just into that period now...
If this tool works as Eswar claims, I believe it is wonderful for people like me who have never had experience with a mobile website. I believe many people will be willing to pay for a tool like that. Of course, we would have to test it to be sure.