Device Acknowledgement – the way forward?

I am probably going to seem contrary to my last few posts, which have centred on designing content and web service with mobile devices in mind in particular, by writing about being device agnostic in the approach to mobile web development.

The problem with a common ‘One Web’ approach i.e. my web service should work on all devices with a web browser (perhaps with a mobile style sheet added) is it does not really acknowledge the challenges and advantages associated with a device. For a moment consider 2G phones (still very common) with web access via the mobile network. Connectivity is relatively slow and large images painful to download (if I even bother trying). However, if I can get to a web service then I have information on the go, which is great if I am trying to find out some local information for example. Now consider a desktop computer, large screen and fast connectivity (with good broadband), great for viewing big images and accessing a variety of multimedia. Appalling if I want it to take it with me anyway. Essentially its the same Internet I am accessing on both devices but the experiences are very different. So maybe we should have two Webs?

Or maybe we need web services that are “Fit-for-purpose”? Lets take Flickr as another example. It has large scale photo sharing and tagging, various groups, discussion forum etc. However there is also mobile Flickr which is very different far less functionality, smaller images but it is intended for use on mobile phones primarily. Both mobile Flickr and Flickr use the same database of images but mobile Flickr resizes them server-side so they are fit for purpose on mobile devices. Desktop Flickr offers lots of other features that simply would be unusable on a mobile device even if it was capable of displaying them. To me this a great example of a real “One Web” approach. Mobile Flickr and Flickr share the same data but do not use it the same way each service fits its environment giving the user a fuller experience according to their context.

I’ve often sought to be device agnostic however, increasingly I think that or content to be delivered in usable environment that we need to also have device acknowledgement. By this I mean we need to make sure that our web services suit the environment they are being used on and this approach is illustrated by the Flickr and mobile Flickr example.

I’ll be looking at the issues to be considered when bringing a desktop web service (like Flickr) to a mobile device at the Handheld Learning Conference 2007.