Sign the Manifesto! Rules for Ethical Reformatting: A Developer Manifesto is developers’ answer to the arrogance of Vodafone, Novarra and all of the others who find it legitimate to disrupt the mobile web.

A ghost is haunting the mobile web, the ghost of content reformatting. The mobile web has never been a simple platform to develop for, given the fragmentation of the underlying technology: different devices, different browsers and different networks have made mobile web development a challenge for programmers and content authors from the beginning.

Yet, in this hard environment, one thing has stayed sacred throughout the years: the HTTP Protocol.

Until today, developers of mobile websites could count on the fact that the HTTP headers from a mobile device would reach the intended webserver with their integrity respected.

Alas, this basic assumption on which thousands of developers have built their applications is put to the test by a recent trend among Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).

Tools that were originally devised as utilities to split up web pages and deliver a best-effort user-experience on a mobile device are today being marketed as solutions to bring the full web to mobile by reformatting vendors. Some MNOs are buying into this vision and are implementing reformatting proxies into their networks that will intercept and reformat all HTTP traffic to any HTTP server without safeguarding those sites which strive to deliver a mobile-optimised user-experience, or, at least, not safeguarding them sufficiently.

This situation is a threat to the neutrality of the web and one that can jeopardize the mobile web as a platform in the years to come.

To this end, mobile developers of various nationalities and background, assembled on the WMLProgramming list at Yahoo Groups create this manifesto to make their position known in the face of those who try to misrepresent the needs and the wishes of the mobile ecosystem for their own petty monetization needs.

If you want to sign, drop Luca an email with your name, title and company.

From : Luca Passani passani at eunet dot no

Much noise has been circulating about Google jumping into the mobile business… well now things are getting more precise. Here is their scoop from their blogs and from their video cast that you can find below. Briefly Google purchased a company called Android in mid 2005. Android’s idea was to make a open software platform based on Linux that would compete with Windows Mobile, RIM’s Blackberry and Symbian and that would be easy to use and free to use. The idea is to set a universal norm so that when developers make applications for mobiles they don’t have to port to each and every mobile device.

Of course that is the stated reason.. or lets say the nice reason, the Google reason is to power the search and the ad revenue that the wireless market has the potential of generating.

To make all of this palatable for handset manufacturers Google has founded the Open Handset Alliance and brought on board key players in the industry with people like Samsung, Motorola but also key telcos like Telefonica, Sprint and NTT DoCoMo.

So if all goes according to plan, there will be lots of phones based on the Open Handset Alliance, running Google-based services. Handset maker HTC, previously wedded to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, has promised to deliver Android phones.

Here is what the Android/Google team has to say about their endeavor. Whatever said and done they look like they’re having fun :

AdMob has released their metrics of who visits in terms of countries and regions as well as what handsets generate traffic on their ad serving network. This data is particularly interesting because the vast majority of AdMob’s traffic is off deck and so the target of the members of MobilOpen.org.

This snapshot of mobile data talks for itself :

The numbers for the devices have a few surprises too :

What isn’t said here is also of key interest :

Three of the top five devices in the US are Smartphones (BlackBerry and Blackjack).

The iPhone is already generating meaningful mobile web traffic.

To get the full report just click here :

By Nigel Choi
Introduction

While experts agree that website reformatting results in poor user-experience,
this aspect may not be so obvious to the less technically savvy.
While Luca has blogged about how bad
making adaptation the default is, I figured it was worth spending
some of my weekend to demonstrate the point as visually as possible for
everyone who cares about this issue.

This document shows how Vodafone UK messes up a website that has
their own way of handling mobile access. I chose the
Wall Street Journal as an example: a popular website,
which also offers its subscribers a mobile-optimized version
of their site. Of course, the problem is the same for any site that
“multi-serves” their content after recognizing the device through the
HTTP user-agent header, the one that Vodafone is removing from all HTTP requests.

Note: I used the good
DeviceAnywhere to collect real
pixel-perfect screenshot of a Nokia 6288 on the VodaUK network.

Some Background Info

Using a PC web browser, the Wall Street Journal is largely a
subscriber-only website.

WSJ is designed with desktop use in mind. As with many other websites,
it’s full of navigation toolbars. These are quite common web development
patterns on commercial websites

“mobile”
The situation is different when users access http://wsj.com/ with a
mobile phone. In this case, users are redirected to http://mobile2.wsj.com/,
which offers WSJ content in a format specifically designed for mobile devices.

The image on the right gives you a feel of the mobile experience.
The UI is not as “cluttered” if compared to the desktop version,
which is a rather obvious choice when considering the costraints
of mobile devices (and mobile users!).
For example, major market indexes are near the top of the page, i.e.
real-time information that’s near the heart of many WSJ subscribers and
which will keep them coming for more multiple times during the day.

Immediately after that, come the latest news.

Interestingly, the mobile version offers access to the full version of
articles that are only available to paying subscribers on the web.
Obviously, someone in WSJ realised that loging in with username
and password on a mobile device was discouraging way too many users
from adopting the service in the first place. Talk about
the importance of usability!

…and then come Novarra and Vodafone

On Vodafone’s network, however, this user-experience is not achievable.
Instead of being redirected to the mobile website, Vodafone has decided to
masquerade every device on their network as a desktop browser:
according to Vodafone (and their vendor Novarra)
users are better off when Novarra’s proxy fetches the desktop version
of the WSJ site, transcodes it and and serves users this transcoded version.

So I went on and checked this out!

The following picture will give you a rather clear idea of what the
website transcoding operated (perpetrated?) by Novarra is all about:

“”

becomes »

“”

The transcoded page has also retained a lot of information that is probably best left
out of the mobile version. Not only is the use case different, but the extra information takes
up valuable screen space and clutters a UI that’s already hard enough to use.

Since the transcoder has no knowledge of what is immediately valuable and what is not,
it ends up retaining almost the entire desktop website, toolbars included.
The original web page is “chopped up” into several mobile pages. Novarra is smart enough
to figure out that those toolbars are not good candidates for the first mobile page,
yet the content that does end on the first mobile page is hardly “critical” for
a mobile user: I got “Site Higlights”, while latest news

would be a much better choice.

There are several other problems with the transcoding. As you can
see from the phone image above, the grey toolbar on the top and bottom
of the mobile page is added by the Vodafone transcoder. However, to a
user who does not know about the transcoder, there is no way to tell
that the page has been adapted from a desktop page to a mobile page,
and that the grey toolbar is added by Vodafone. This is different
from what Google
does, for example, by placing a note “Page adapted for mobile phone” at
the bottom.

Other User Interface Problems

There are other serious issues with the user-experience offered by
the transcoded pages. The issues are illustrated by the pictures below.

A user that intends to read an article will click their way
down to the “What’s news” section of the transcoded front page (lots of clicks,
and everyone knows what a pain it is to be forced to click endlessly on
a mobile phone).

After the new page has been retrieved and transcoded, the user will need to scroll
down (lots of extra clicks) before the beginning of the article shows up on the screen.

But the suffering is not over. A hurdle that was simply not there in the mobile version
shows its ugly face: “PLEASE LOG IN AT THE TOP RIGHT OF THE PAGE”.
Hold on a sec. Where is the “top right of the page”? I am
a power users. Regular users would be totally lost here and would simply give up.

Being a mobile professional, I know what is going on: the system
is referring to the desktop page of course, so I have to scroll
all the way back up, then click on the previous page [<<] button
in the tool bar and reach the first
transcoded page again, which probably has the login form waiting for me.

One little note: I waited too long before clicking on the Novarra page buttons,
and I was greeted with an error message (third picture).

Trying again, I am able to enter my username
and password. After clicking on the
“Secure” login button, and several confirmation screens

later, I am somehow greeted by a non-transcoded page.
By entering http://wsj.com/ again in the browser, I am able to see the
full article.

….if Vodafone just let the User-Agent header through, the Wall
Street Journal would have detected that I am using a mobile phone and so much suffering
would be saved! I could access mobile front page, where the
article I want to read is one of the first links. I could just
click on the link and get the full
article. One click from the front
page and I’m reading the full article text, compared to the multiple
clicks and hunting I had to do using the transcoded version.

Adding to the problem is that I am not able to logout successfully.
I can click on the logout link and is told by
the site that I am logged out. But
it seems that the web site uses some sort of Javascript for logging
out. Going back to the site, I am still logged in. Changing the cookie setting in the phone does not
work. Instead, I have to hunt down the “settings”
link in the bottom of the transcoded page, and clear cookies there.

Conclusion

The Novarra reformatting is a mess: all I could see are roughly chopped up
web sites which deliver cluttered mobile pages. From an user-exprience point of view,
pages reformatted by Novarra are simply a nightmare which are guaranteed to keep
normal users away from the mobile web. As badly as one can criticize Novarra, though,
one can only be amazed about Vodafone UK’s decision to masquerade the
User-Agent HTTP header and spoil the efforts of thousands of
companies who tried to deliver a decent mobile experience to their mobile users.
Replacing real mobile experience with the pathetic parody of the web provided by Novarra
escapes my understanding.

Forums and companies have been a buzz for the past few weeks about the fact that Vodafone UK has blocked the user agent from being transmitted to mobile internet sites.

As one former Vodafone employee puts it : “ Vodafone claim they take this action because their newer devices’ browsers can handle a full web site (with a little help from their transcoder).The stated aim is to allow folks to browse the web from their mobile phone without being restricted to the “mobile” versions, or little/nothing where no mobile version exists.”

User agents are used by mobile content providers and mobile sites to optimize the content or the sites and services to the particular mobile of the user.

David Harper founder of MobileMonday New York and Founder, Winksite had this to say, “Vodafone’s actions thwart the efforts of companies in the mobile
ecosystem who set out to provide a customized mobile presentation of their services, hurt these companies financially, and is counter to the advancements facilitated by groups such as the W3C and dotMobi.

Wurfl which is an open database of user-agents and is led by Luca Passini has been venting justified rage on this blog. He had this to say quite justly : ” If we don’t make some noise now and let the industry understand that developers won’t give up without a fight, I fear that the battle will get much harder to fight down the road.”

It is quite obvious that mobile devices are not ready yet for the full web experience. It is also true that mobile content providers (including the MNOs) have got fat on selling content at highly inflated prices. The web is coming to the mobile that is inevitable and in my opinion is a good thing. The question is whether the user MNOs control the traffic or the user who controls which sites are visited.

At the beginning of the web there was a concerted effort to restrict users from going where they wanted. This effort ultimately failed. I would place a safe bet that though the mobile web is still controlled via the pipe that the MNOs hold restricting access to mobile content and services will ultimately fail.

A very interesting model, and I believe a model to be emulated by MNOs elsewhere, has evolved at Bouygues Telecom in France. Bouygues allowed and even encouraged users to get out of their walled garden, the French imode portal. Users did explore and today Bouygues’ share of off deck traffic represents close to 60% of all off deck traffic in France (the other MNOs are Orange and SFR, subsidiary of Vodafone). Yet their portal is still doing very well ! Using the portal is easier to use, the sites are classified and limited. This appeals to a certain public. But the off deck appeals too for stuff that they can’t get on deck. The two co-exist. And what ever the case the MNO wins as they raise data ARPU.

Others who have commented on this issue are Mike Butcher from Techcrunch UK.