Barcamp Delhi - Talk by the Opera guys and the mobile web

I was there at barcamp delhi this past weekend, it was great by the way, great job done by the organizers.

There was a talk by Sigbjorn Vik, Opera Software, which was really interesting ... he talked about the developments that are planned for the Opera browser, both on the PC and mobile. Some of the things that I found interesting -

- Calendar : On travel sites where travel dates are to be entered by user, usually these days you'd see a calendar pop-up allowing you to select the dates. This is common with almost all travel sites except that all have to make their custom implementations of the same. So Sigbjorn mentioned that they plan to put this functionality in the browser itself so that no custom implementations are required ... now that makes sense.

- xHTML + voice - Having speech to text conversion built into the browser allowing users to easily fill up information on web pages without too much work for the developers who make the website.

... and there were a bunch of other features as well. Now the key thing to notice here is that, at a high level they are trying to put that functionality in the browser which users are likely to use or are already using and simplify the job of the web developers or enable them to do things which they couldn't have done on a browser today.

Now lets look at the mobile side of the picture ... how should our mobile web look like, our mobile web should have constructs that users are likely to use or are already using today. For example,

- if you launch the menu of a phone today you'd see nice icons laid out in a matrix, when selecting one of them you have it blow up in size then you select what you want to do with that from your options menu.

- similarly your addressbook has a list of contacts, and you move up and down between them and use your options menu to perform actions on that contact.

... and so on. Now lets think about it, this is what users are doing ... so why aren't we trying to take mobile web in this direction and instead focussing on optimizing webpages with hyperlinks for phones. The day we look at the mobile web from a user standpoint instead of thinking about fitting HTML pages on phones, the mobile web would be much more successful.

Think about it ... HTML was designed keeping in mind the PC, instead if you had phones come first would HTML be the way it is today?

Mobile Social Networks, are we there yet?

Mobile is hot these days, with a lot of investment going into it and so are social networks (myspace, youtube ...). Now lets focus on the niche when we merge these 2 concepts, i.e., mobile social networks ... is the picture still as rosy?

We have been through some of that with our product LinknSurf, and there are a lot of observations that we have made ... my understanding is that it will still be sometime before mobile social networks are ready, the infrastructure is still not there yet.

For a social network to be successful, you need to get together people of similar interests and allow them to communicate over their common interests. Talking about communication on the mobile phone, lets see what we have today:

- Voice: A voice based social network, hmmm ... somehow that is hard to imagine, or is it just my imagination ;-)

- SMS: SMS based social networks would come with their own limitations - 160 chars, always alerting behavior, cost involved on a per SMS basis ...

- Mobile web: Now this could be close if mobile sites were more usable, there weren't latency issues with accessing those and if everyone with a mobile phone had GPRS. The reality is that mobile web is still not there yet.

- A mobile app like j2me, symbian: This is better than mobile sites because of the usability that it offers, however, there are still 2 factors that would prevent this - varied devices not all of them could support a feature rich app and most people with mobile phones don't have GPRS.

There are a bunch of mobile social networking apps like Rabble, fotochatter, litefeeds etc. but the userbase growth has been limited ... the key issue being ... if I as a user want to connect to a user with whom I share a common interest what is likelyhood of that person having
- GPRS access ?
- A supported handset ?

So the millon dollar question is, how could we make a social network on mobile phones successful, any answers?