I’ve visited this topic before, but this time, in addition to my beautiful wife and two charming daughters, I traveled with a new companion, a brand new HTC TyTN II with an unlimited data plan. While this may sound “ho-hum” to you Americans, unlimited data is an impossible dream here in Canada. Our mobile providers are still holding us hostage for daring to check emails while on the road. It’s a sad state of affairs for an otherwise civilized country.

 

All Wired Up and No Place to Go

 

The combination of 3G speeds, a relatively powerful device and the elimination of worry about a roaming data bill spinning upwards faster than gas prices proved to be a heady and intoxicating combination for me. Unfortunately, I found that although (metaphorically) I was all dressed up, there were still precious few places to go. A couple of times I found my self saying, “surely there must be a WAP site for that” only to find myself trying to negotiate non-mobile friendly interfaces in a horribly glitchy browser. While the potential was so intoxicating, the reality fell far short.

 

This was a topic I touched on briefly in my opening remarks at the last Search Insider Summit. Mobile is the place where discontinuous innovation is most likely. There must have been a dozen times over the last 2 weeks where I said, “it would be so great if someone could…” and completed the sentence with something that seemed so obvious to me yet apparently was unavailable at this time.

 

So Much Potential, So Little Functionality

 

Now, much as I’d like to say that it’s my incredible vision that brought all these great possibilities to light, I suspect these are not undiscovered ideas. I’m sure that many companies are sitting on them, just waiting for the right convergence of device horsepower, input and output performance enhancements, bandwidth and standardization to roll these mobile killer apps out. Once some of current bottlenecks are solved, or at least relaxed, I believe there will be a rush of mobile innovation that’s been sitting on a shelf, biding it’s time.

 

Here’s just one example. While on Kauai, I started dreaming of actually owning property there. I indulge in this little fantasy (the huge gap between my income and Kauai property prices unquestionably defines this as a fantasy) every year. So I did a little searching on Zillow.com just to see how out of reach my dreams were. Now, on the laptop, Zillow is a rich information resource for real estate shoppers. But when you go mobile, its functionality is limited to texting an address to Zillow, and it sending back the current market price of the property as a return text message. While intriguing, this falls far short of Zillow’s total online experience. How amazing would it be to drive through neighborhoods, GPS enabled PDA or smartphone in hand, and have maps instantly updated with available properties and details. You can almost here the words coming out of my mouth: “It would be so great if…” Well, you get the idea.

 

Google: a Map in the Right Direction

 

I used Google Maps on the mobile a lot while I was away, and I have to admit, I’m pretty impressed with the functionality that has been squeezed into this little app. But we’re barely scratching the surface of what’s possible. Using it to look for a good Mexican restaurant while hiding out from a down pour in Waikiki was an experience that would have driven a lesser man to tears. It’s not really Google’s fault, it’s the lack of online, mobile friendly presence on the part of almost every business on the planet. Yes, I’ve heard all the market rationalizations about early adoption, critical mass of markets, bandwidth required to mobilize local advertisers…yadda, yadda, yadda. But Dammit, the potential is just so tantalizing!

 

So, my expectations of mobile nirvana fell a little flat, but you’ll be happy to hear I made a full recovery after intensive and repeated beach and Mai Tai therapy.

 

Mahalo!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• User Experience: Allowing developers to design applications on top of your platform provides the ability for users to have unique experiences tailored specifically for them. From a mobile perspective there will now potentially be a thousand different versions of the same operating system each tweaked slightly so that it fits the owners needs. Furthermore it will allow people to share the coolest parts of their user experience across all networks.
• Standardization: With numerous partners involved in both OpenSocial and Android, developers have a standardized way of creating applications for users without having to worry about platform. The standard platform also helps define documentation, procedures and application sharing.
• Cost: Open platforms always tend to be far less expensive than mainstream/off the shelf products. With platforms such as Android in place, users will notice a cut in cost compared to handhelds operating systems like Windows Mobile and Palm OS.
• Innovation: Giving developers the access to such powerful and flexible platforms will encourage increased innovation as they compete to develop the next killer application.
• Support: Open Platforms (1 common base) equals Thousands of Developers which equals the amount of support available for applications and configuration that are built on top of the platform.

"Android does not differentiate between the phone's core applications and third-party applications. They can all be built to have equal access to a phone's capabilities providing users with a broad spectrum of applications and services. With devices built on the Android Platform, users will be able to fully tailor the phone to their interests. They can swap out the phone's homescreen, the style of the dialer, or any of the applications. They can even instruct their phones to use their favorite photo viewing application to handle the viewing of all photos."

"OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds. Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community."

Original Post: Web Analytics World - Benefits of OpenSocial, Android