(Vodafone)

Vodaphone is involved in development of open standards, development of GSM and 3G, open standards on the web, developing new open standards for rich media UI on the mobile platform.

Do users want the web on their mobile? Large chunk of people here use the web on the phone every day – even amongst developers, there’s an increase over numbers from a year ago. Rise in number of devices that are web-capable, compared to PCs. Especially true in developing world where there are more mobile phones but there is no landline infrastructure and few PCs. BBC News is getting more hits from Africa via mobile now.

User insight studies in UK. People use mobile web for looking up recipes to researching car purchases, one guy who looks for wrecked Ferraris via the web on his phone as he is driving round. Most used sites on mobile web:

1. Hotmail
2. BBC News
3. Google
4. Holymoly
5. BBC Sport 0fooball
6. Gmail
7. Orange World
… long tail distribution.

There’s a need for best practises for mobile web and good device description/information. Either need a developer toolkit or its open source.

Vodaphone started the Mobile Web Best Practices group, and a Mobile Device Description group which works on device information standards, so that you can use that information as easily as any other standard.

Best practices, published late last year via W3C.

– design for one web, not a mobile web and a fixed web
– rely on web standards
– stay away from known hazards
– be cautious of device limitations, understand the environment that you’re working in, you have limited screen size, memory and bandwidth; features such as cookies won’t always work
– optimise navigation, screen size again an issue
– check graphics and colours
– keep it small, bandwidth issues even with 3G networks, so apps used to making frequent requests is an issue
– use the network sparingly
– help and guide user input
– think of users on the go, if I am a user walking down the street, do I want the same information and the same user experience as if I’m at a PC? No. From an information architecture and usability perspective, you want to rethink how you interact with the user when they are mobile.

Key is thematic consistency: ensure that content provided by accessing a URI yields a thematically coherent experience when accessed from different devices. So if reading an article on a PC, should be able to read the same thing on a mobile device, just presented appropriately.

– valid markup
– stye sheet use
– cookies – do not rely on them
– objects and scripts – may not work

Dev.mobi
.Mobi is a join venture between Nokia, Microsoft and Vodaphone. Top level domain for websites designed for mobiles. Put work into standards, lots of development resources.

Mobile 2.0
Do we have 20-itis? Do we need ‘mobile web 2.0’? We do need to put a stake in the ground to say we are moving to an internet model. Transition from mobile applications to an internet model, less controlled, less like cable TV. Mobile web opening up, and becoming a platform for innovation.

– Mobile web and connected applications.
– User choice
– Using open standards
– More interactive mobile applications running in the browser

Creating scalable (to cope with different screen sizes) applications within the browser for rich applications, such as video and football scores and information. Mobile Ajax. SVG-based.

Soonr, Windows mobile running Opera Mobile, Soonr, uses very web-like UI, with progress bar, highlight bar, etc. Not used to that within the browser context. Slideshow. Can access data from web via PC.

WICD: SVG, xHTML, CSS, DOM. User agent behaviour. Baseline for rich media Web Application development on the mobile platform.

Upcoming standards and projects
– Web API Working Group
– Web Applications Formats Working Group: Mobile widgets, good fit because very focused information. Los of widget toolkits and frameworks, but all fairly similar.
– Mobile AJAX Workshop: W3C and Open Ajax Alliance

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History of Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Was an acquisition start-up, 2Web Technologies/XL2Web, applied financial services setting. Then Upstartle/Writely. Launched in Labs. then launched properly in Oct 06. had to bring user interface together for both. Feb 2007 globalised to 14 languages.

Fits well with the Google mission. “Organise my information…”, make it accessible and useful, and share with whomever I choose (and nobody else, thanks).

Everyone is creating content every day.

Accepted/familiar interface for spreadsheets and documents. Accessibility from anywhere. Easy to use collaboration. DIY community creation.

– Collaboration with others on the same doc/spreadsheet, in real time, without proliferation of version/copies.
– Online storage – accessible ‘anywhere’
– Publishing – people who already create content become publishers
– API – for developers

Must be easy to use. Must be feature rich, but also simple to use. Challenge.

Not able to demo because of wifi problems.

General Architecture
– Server-side calculation engine
– Ajax client
– Collaboration layer
– Storage layer
– Infrastructure and shared services (aka ‘everything else’)

Google’s infrastructure allows cheap scaling, ‘just add water (machines)’. Team stays focused on features and integration. But challenge is that you can’t launch so quickly because can’t launch until it can scale, and whilst it’s cheap it’s not easy to move to Google infrastructure.

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Right time to be talking about OpenID. Supported by AOL, MS, Symantec. Bill Gates spent 7 minutes talking about OpenID. Digg announced yesterday.

“It’s definitely time to declare OpenID a winner and the hope for making a single-sign on world a reality” – Mike Arrington, TechCrunch.

Authentication on the web completely sucks. As soon as you see a sign-in form. Need to remember which username we chose, as there’s a massive war for the namespace so you don’t always get the name you want. Need to remember which password you used. If you sign in with an email address it’s a bit easier, but if you lose access you lose ability to regain a forgotten password.

Yahoo! registration form, as an example, asks for too much information, too long of a form.

Have dozens of different accounts on different sites. We have this problem now, but we are early adopters. Everyone else will have this problem soon, if not already.

Single sign-on will save us, will give us just one log-in.

Done before: Microsoft Passport, and Typekey. But do you trust Microsoft? And if you don’t trust them, surely you trust the Trotts? San Francisco’s cutest couple? But what if they turn evil? Not good for one company to manage your log-in.

Want single sign-on, but don’t want a single point of control. OpenID decentralises who manages your identity. You can pick one place to manager. You can even run your own identity server. Doesn’t matter where it is hosted.

Your identity is an URL. So your username is your URL. LiveJournal started it, e.g. swillison.livejournal.com. Also solve the namespace issue, because a URL is globally unique.

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(New York Times)

Khoi Vinh and his team don’t design the news, don’t do the illustrations – that’s done by visual journalists on the editorial side. They instead do the platforms, frameworks, templates.

Contrast with print design, which has had some art direction, and the online version of the same story which is just a standard design that looks identical to other articles on the website. Using templates. Trying to innovate at the template level.

Too difficult to actively design the news because the tools cannot keep pace with real time. Internet allows instantaneous publishing, but it does not yet allow for instantaneous design.

One of the projects is the NYTimes.com/travel. Old travel site was very standard, just journalistic content. Now using travel tools, booking tools, rating tools, user generated content. Design at the user experience and template level.

Working with photo editors, talking about how they want to display slideshows, do captions etc.

Occasionally they do go to extra lengths to develop customised layouts for the home page, e.g. to mark the 5th anniversary of September 11. This is highly specific design presentation, and the way we should be designing. But it’s time consuming and not currently compatible with syndication models. Even though they are using CSS and HTML, they are foisting presentation layer into the RSS which it’s not used for, so it breaks.

Special projects with sufficient lead time, e.g. elections in 2006, developed a number of templates for displaying the information. But need a lot of warning so that they can get the templates up.

One day, our tools will evolve such that we will be able to design in real time. This will be a new kind of publishing, one that will be dramatically more mature than what we have today.

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Twingly is a site that Ryan spotted during a break, so he asked the developers to quickly show it to us all. It’s a real-time 3D representation of the blogosphere – a spinning globe with columns that indicate blog activity. The blog posts being published scroll by on the left, and it shows you where the blog post is from by a line which joins the post excerpt with the correct column. Go look – it’s really cool!

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(Microsoft)

Talking about IE, and browsers.

What happened in 2001? Wasn’t a lot of adoption of the web platform, there wasn’t much building of ‘Web 2.0’ type stuff, even though the tools were there. IE was then the only browser that could handle these things. Dot.com bubble burst, experiments with “Web OS” and other super-rich web apps, which ultimately failed. Hacking became lucrative around 2000/01. Whole industry hit, but MS and IE hit the hardest. Spent a lot of time retraining everyone around security. Trying to fix what wasn’t secure, produced Service Pack 2, took a lot of resources. IE in SP2 was almost a whole new browser, just didn’t look like it because it was all security-based.

2005, Ajax gets a name. “We sort of invented it in 1998, great that the industry finally picked up on it”. The pattern of Ajax serves the realisation that you need to care about the UI, and the user experience. It wasn’t that something new happened in terms of tech in 2005, because most Web 2.0 stuff could have run in IE6, which shipped in 01. But in 2006, the idea of the web being the semantic web, that RSS is hitting the mainstream, the idea that you can have microformats that bring new meaning to HTML without redefining the language, tagging.

Other browsers. Hard to get excited about adding new features to IE which people just weren’t going to use anyway. But MS always does work best when there is competition.

Late 2006, IE7 finally shipped. Focused on improving user experience; security and trustworthiness; web developer platform, including missing pieces of standards, bugs, etc.

User experience: tabs, OpenSearch, page zoom, better printing.

Integrated RSS platform: feed discovery and default feed view; common platform for feeds: feedlist, storage, parser, sync engine, used by other Windows apps, not just IE, all use same engine.

Security: protection against web fraud: integrated anti-phishing service; user experience highlights security. Put the user in control: warn of insecure settings; explicit user consent is required on the first run of ActiveX; integration of parental controls.

Web developer platform: thinking a bit differently about this than had before. Spoke to real developers, fixed bugs, fixed inconsistencies. Added standards features for CSS and HTML. Added other heavily-requested features, such as the alpha channel in PNG images. Fixed memory leaks, and a number of other things. Problem is that sites started breaking.

“I’m really concerned that we’re breaking stuff in the name of goodness and that all users and developers will walk away with is ‘stuff broke’.” – Wilson’s Boss’s Boss.

Assumption is that IE guys don’t know what they are doing, but the reality is that they have fixed things that were broken before, [and that maybe people had done kludges to deal with]. Have to be careful how we deploy IE7. Uses ‘Quirks Mode’, so all the oddness that people had done before still worked, and most of the improvements only work in ‘Strict Mode’. Half the web actually uses Strict Mode, it’s increasingly popular, and developers expect behaviour not to change, except when they tell it to.

Multiple IE versions on one machine. Just not technically possible to put different versions of IE on one machine and have them work properly. It’s not designed to do this. There are some hacks that sort of work, but they don’t replace everything. So released a virtual PC image that contained Windows Xp SP2 and IE6, so you can have both IE6 and IE7 on the same machine for free.

Other tools
Visual Web Developer Express, developer tool supporting HTML, CSS, XML etc.
Microsoft Expression Web: a professional tool for creating standards-based web sites.
ASP.net Ajax: client-side JavaScript framework for creating reusable components and libraries.
WPF/E: for adding vector graphics, imaging, text, audio and video. Cross-platform and cross-browser.

Future of IE
Compatibility and standards are important. Must not break the web. Evolution, not revolution.

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(Digg)

How Digg got to where they are today
Lots of new start -ups that want to get the community involved, but are they creating the right motivation for their apps? Why should the crowd care? How do you get people involved and using the system? How are people using the site?

Wanted to create incentives for users at every level, maybe just to read, to Digg, to clear out spam.

1. Why submit content to Digg? Couple of systems he looked at were Slashdot and Delicious. Slashdot had around 500 newly submitted stories each day. Asked why people submit as its editors who decide what goes on the front page. Answer: people want to share with the community what they think is important. Want to see their name in lights, see their username or icon on the front page.

So that’s pretty easy. If there’s enough people visiting the front page there’s motivation to get your name in lights.

Del.icio.us. Joshua originally saw the site as where you store your most important information, it’s now about sharing and pushing bookmarks to friends, using the for:name tag to push to someone’s inbox. So there’s an incentive to see your link on Del.icio.us popular page.

So Digg, built friends functionality and made this sort of stuff easy. There are people who find it important to Digg stories before anyone else.

Wanted to empower the individual, need to give the user a vote.

False circle, as people Digg a story, if it ends up on the front page, and stuff gets re-Dugg and its stays on the front page. Crazy combinations of stories.

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If your Mum changes her phone number and emails you a .vcf file, you have to add it to your address book, connect your phone to Bluetooth… but you have to pair it first, so end up using a cable… and then fire up iSync to get your contacts on your phone.

That’s how it is today.

But everyone has different devices, and each device has its own address book, so we end up with contact pools. It’s difficult to sync. If someone changes their number, you have to input it several times, which is made worse because the interface is awful. Input methods, like T9, can get in the way for names.

Soocial.com creates one contact pool, and distribute them to devices when you need it.

So, your Mum changes her number, you double click, it’s automatically distributed to all your devices. It doesn’t spam your friends asking them to update their contacts. If you update your number, it automatically updates on everyone else’s address books.

Desktop apps like Address Book, Office, and MS Outlook will have a plug-in. Developing an open API, because it needs to work in your apps. There will also be a web app to help you manage your contact information.

Soocial.com, alpha on invitation.

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(Yahoo!)

‘User’ is a bit of a derogatory term, and have to move away from using the term and turn ‘users’ into ‘people’. Came up with a pyramid:

1% – creators
10% – synthesisers
100% – consumers

Web 2.0 tries to make everyone a creator
100% – creators
100% synthesisers
100% – consumers

Try to make it easier for everyone to participate in all roles.

Anyone with an X is now a Y
keyboard –> author
camera –> photographer
iPod –> DJ
browser –> publisher

There is a dark side. If you factor out all the pirated content on YouTube you have chimps doing karate. Democratising publishing and the best they can come up with is this. Lots of UGC can be a sad experience.

But when you look at some of the most interesting photos in Flickr they are amazing. These are ‘user generated content’, all taken by ordinary people, not professional photographers. It’s amazing in quality, it’s emotionally moving, some of it’s funny.

Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ is an algorithm, done implicitly. The concept is stuff that is interesting to everyone, not just those who know the person involved. Look at how many times the photos was commented on, viewed, blogged about, linked to, etc. All that organic activity allows us to distil ‘interestingness’. When they launched it, there was no gaming of the system, no spam. Could use retroactive techniques to go back into the archives and see what the most interesting photo on the day they launched was.

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(Amazon)

Doug Kaye, building GigaVox Audio Lite. Lots of annoying things that you have to do to get a podcast sound professional, so GigaVox is an app where you drop in your MP3, and it’s converted and published. You can, if you want, put ads in and publish it.

Doug hardly did anything when he developed this – he used Amazon’s S3 Storage at the centre of it, and the EC2 service to do much of the processing. EC2 means that you can just use processors when you need it, and when you aren’t using it you don’t pay for it.

What if
– launching a new business on the web was simple?
– you only had to focus on the business
– You could manage growth more easily

What if you only had to compete on idea?
– That’s now how the world is right now, it’s a hassle to get things going.

John Hagel and John Seely Brown wrote a paper called From Push to Pull – Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources.

What we are seeing online with the way that resources are used, these trends are happening in all sectors.

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