I’ve been doing a lot of reading and thinking on the theme of Mobile Web in anticipation for the Future of Mobile event this week. This has included trying for a few weeks now to get into ‘Mobile Web 2.0′ by Ajit Jankar and Tony Fish.

I’ve been finding it a little hard going, but perhaps I’m not target audience - the bit I’ve managed to get through so far has mostly been about semantics and business.

But there have been a couple of observations I’ve found interesting - the assertion that ‘capturing content at the point of inspiration‘ will be one of the main drivers of the Mobile Web 2.0, and the idea of mobile handsets as just one of the ’screens’ we use to interact with the web as a whole - others being broadcast screens e.g. TVs which we tend to sit and watch, and interactive screens e.g. PCs which have probably the ultimate user interface, and can be used to configyre the ‘big screen’.

This comes back to their first point that:

‘Mobile Web 2.0 devices will drive the capture of imagination. The information is not just pictures - but rather a range of things like: calendars (the things you need to remember); notes and reminders (viewpoints and ideas that you want to work on later); news (citizen’s reporting) etc. These will then be stored in your private web space.’

I get the idea, and can see it happenning one day, but I don’t think we’re ready yet. Despite the coming of Facebook and other ‘online personality’ applications, we haven’t quite widely adopted the ‘private web space’. Even writing this blog I have not been tempted to use my phone to capture inspiration (textually at any rate) the user interface is still too awful.

So what are phones good for and how could current devices be used to make the mobile Web succeed?

• Communication - the original ‘killer app’, but it needn’t just be voice, or SMS / email, but it could also be updating your Facebook or Twitter status, or forum / chat sites.
• Entertainment - MP3 player, streaming content, games, web surfing
• Navigation - most phones have GPS built in now and mobile mapping apps are widesprea
• Mobile search - information on the go: ‘where’s my nearest’ etc.
• Alerts - football scores, breaking news - pushed informationcan find you anywhere
• Content Capture - photo / video in addition to text / data

My view of the ones that will succeed? The ones that are enabled by or rely on the mobility of the device and are weakened without it.

You (nearly) always have your phone with you. Most devices now are more than adequate cameras and MP3 players in addition to phones; some are acceptable as email devices or PDAs.

The line between phone, camera, media player and satnav is blurring - these are turning into realy usable useful devices.

Any sort of web browsing that isn’t bookmarked or pushed to you is a right pain that puts up too big a barrier in my view - but improvements in technologies and user interfaces (e.g. the N95 and iPhone) are making this better. I don’t buy the ‘content at the point of inspiration’ as a major driver (yet).

For me this is still the least likely factor to drive the sucess of the Mobile web, but I’m keeping an open mind. If it were to work, Google would have bought moblog by now.

Tony, I’ll probably be the tallest chap at FoM if you want to argue the point.