Comments on: Kevin McCloskey of MobileAware: “Who put Vodafone in charge of mobile content?”

By: Luca Passani

Luca Passani — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 21:55:36 +0000

“No thought is required, let the user decide” - well, but this is exactly why Kevin is right and Novarra/Vodafone are wrong. Without going too deep into technical details, Novarra is hiding original device information from HTTP requests. This prevents content providers from providing an optimized mobile experience and let users decide if they want a mobile site OR the scaled-down web experience Novarra can deliver. My impression here is that we are in the presence of either arrogance or ignorance of the mobile internet, possibly both.

Luca

By: RS

RS — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:07:52 +0000

Martin, Curt,
I think you are misinterpreting Kevin McCloskey’s comment. I believe he is saying it is cumbersome and frustrating for a mobile user to navigate through thousands or millions of search results, and given the various constraints that mobile devices operate under (small screen sizes, not-so-fast internet conections, lack of full sized keyboards), a mobile user would find it more practical to see fewer and more relevant results. I personally would prefer fewer results if they actually were more relevant - for example, if I searched for Boston on my mobile phone, I would prefer to see the Boston weather, local events and links to movie showtimes on my mobile phone rather than getting hundreds of results pointing me to links such as the history of Boston, Boston university, the wikipedia entry on Boston and so on which I find completely irrelevant.

By: Curt

Curt — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:25:41 +0000

I agree with Martin here, NO ONE should decide what content is accessible on the Internet other than the user him/her self. I don’t know who’s more ridiculous here, Vodafone or Kevin McCloskey.

No thought is required, let the user decide. Can anyone imagine what would happen if our Internet access provider controlled what we could access online? Worst yet, imagine if Microsoft, who provides the operating system to most of the personal computers in the world controlled what we could access on the web - the web would not be the commercial success it is today.

By: Martin

Martin — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 13:14:04 +0000

“The world does not need access to the Web’s 15 billion pages from their mobile phones. For mobile content to be useful to the end user, there needs to be some level of relevancy and immediacy to the information provided.”

This is such rubbish. Who is Kevin McCloskey to decide what people want on the phones. This is such a desktop users view of the internet.

Give people everything and let them choose what is relevant.