W3C tries to improve the user experience of the mobile web

Mobile Web Market
The number of mobile web users is growing rapidly. From the statistical report of CNNIC in 2007, the number of mobile web users in China is 44.3 millions. The largest mobile market in the world are China, US and Japan.

Mobile Web User
What mobile users really concern in browsing on a mobile website:

• Cost (always the first thing that users concern about)
  
• Easy way to look for the right information (consistent navigation method)
• readability of the website
  
• Time (get what they want in a short time)
• Having the same browsing experience on different mobile phone

Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0
W3C provides some basic guidelines for improving the user experience of the mobile web. Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 is a mobile web standard that helps us to design and develop a good browsing experience to mobile users. It is like a guideline that telling you "do not do this, and do not do that", and "keeping it simple ... for user".




Read more:
Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0

Tweet Tweet Tweet! Twitter Everywhere!

I believe Twitter will become a big thing in the coming future. Let me just give you a quick update on Twitter.

Twitter

Twitter is a mini-blog web service. It is very simple but addictive. Not like blog, you don’t need to have a topic and write a long paragraph. You can just say a sentence or two words telling people “what are you doing?”. The messages you post are stored in a timeline stream.

There are a lot of cool mashup applications of Twitter out there on the web, such as twittermap, twittervision, Twitticious, Twitter Planet, Twittercal … and more. Twitter now has a huge number of users and there are some competitors coming out like Jaiku, buboo, fanfou …

Jaiku

One of the biggest competitors is Jaiku. Jaiku is similar to Twitter but it has more features. I tried to use Jaiku on my PC and on my mobile phone but I don’t like to use it very much. Jaiku has developed a mobile application (Symbian) for Nokia S60 phones.
http://jaiku.com/
http://jaiku.com/mobile/s60/models

Mobile Apps for Twitter

Abiro Jitter
- very simple Java application for twitter
[More] [Download Page]

JTwitter
“jtwitter is a Java application that you install on your phone. It allows you to enter twitter updates using your phone without having to send SMS´s. It also allows you to view your timeline, friends timelines, public and featured timelines.”
[More] download from mobile: www.jtwitter.com/wap

Twitter widget for Widsets
- If you are Widsets user, you can download the twitter widget for your widset on your mobile phone.
[More] [Download Page]

Twibble
- a GPS enabled twitter client for the Nokia N95
[More]

Twitter Mobile page
http://m.twitter.com

more Twitter mobile apps:
http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

Blogger Goes Mobile

"Snap a photo and write some text … send it to blogger, and we’ll do the rest!” Now, we can blog everywhere.

With Blogger Mobile, we can easily make a post to your blog by just sending the text and/or photos from your mobile phone to go@blogger.com via mms or e-mail. You don’t need any installation and you can just do it right away with your phone now.

You don’t need to have a blogger account in order to use the Blogger Mobile service. By sending e-mail to go@blogger.com from your phone and it will create a new blog for you automatically. It will send you back the address of your blog after that and you can visit it on the web. You may claim the blog later if you want to edit your blog.

The bad thing is that it supports to only some US carriers (Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T/Cingular). It won’t work if you send a mail to go@blogger.com from your webmail gateway, Gmail for example.

If you would like to post to your blog via e-mail, you may use the Mail-to-Blogger feature in the blogger. It will give you an secret email address (NOT go@blogger.com) for you to do the posting. However, you can only post text.

The service is free but there may be a charge for sending MMS or e-mail from your mobile phone, which depends on your service plan that you are using of your phone service provider (operator / carrier).

I didn’t try it out yet, so I can’t give any comments on that. The way that blogger is trying to do is to make the things easier for the mobile users to make a post by just sending an e-mail or mms. That's good because the mobile users do not need to spend a lot of time to learn how to use the service. Comparing to making a mobile app for this service, they may lose some mobile users that refuse to do installation because some mobile users feels installation is a pain for them.

To know more:
Blogger Mobile
Blogger Mobile FAQ