Web 2.0 needs to be adapted to mobiles

In fact, the Google Maps map service, social networks, and many other Web 2.0 applications are ideal for use on mobile phones or handheld computers. But only theoretically. In practice, everything is not so simple. Experts warn that the implementation of Web 2.0 on mobile phones requires a different approach .



“Beware of simply copying PC services,” said David Wood, executive vice president of Symbian, speaking at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London.



David Wood warns that mobile phones and cellular networks have “inherent limitations” that prevent many Web 2.0 services from working on mobile phones in the same way that they work on personal computers connected via broadband. Web 2.0 programs will have to be specially adapted for mobile phones.



As an example, Google Maps is an application that was originally designed for a PC. The program works on Ajax and supports the method of preliminary “swap” information on the client’s computer in order to speed up the subsequent work with the program. For a mobile phone, such an algorithm is not very suitable: here it is desirable to reduce traffic to a minimum. Therefore, Google has recently introduced a special mobile version of Google Maps with reduced traffic consumption and a special kilobyte counter in real time mode ( Google Maps video on Treo ).

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Approximately the same will have to be done by other creators of Web 2.0 services if they want to enter the billion-dollar army of mobile phone owners.



One of the options for switching to a mobile platform is a partial rejection of the universal browser, and instead, the release of special client software, mobile widgets that would be installed on the phone to work with a particular Web 2.0 service. For example, the free program ShoZu helps mobile phone users to publish photos and videos on the Internet. With this program, you can also post your photo comments on Flickr . For comparison, if you open the Flickr website in a mobile browser, then it takes 165 seconds to add a comment and 71.4 KB of traffic to add a comment, and through ShoZu, only 16 seconds and 3.25 KB, respectively.



Of course, there are some downs to using client programs, because users will often have to download and install new software. Developers hope that with improved bandwidth communication channels from specialized programs can be abandoned.



According to experts, in the very near future, many owners of Web 2.0 services will wake up interest in mobile users, and we will see significant progress in this direction. Perhaps there will even be fundamentally new Web 2.0 services that will take advantage of mobile devices, for example, location information, as well as the constant presence of the device next to the user 24 hours a day. Maybe it will be Web 3.0 already?