Tom Hume

So, it's been a week since I got back from Mobile 2.0 - and therefore highly remiss that I've not written about it yet.

I really enjoyed both the Developer Day and the main event. The former seemed to be focused around mobile web - with widgets in particular getting a lot of prominence. Whilst I'm not convinced that widgets are the future of all mobile apps, it's an area where - until recently - I've let myself lag behind a little, so I got a lot out of the sessions. And one quote from the very beginning has stuck with me - Dan Appelquist remarking that applications are nowadays being consumed more like songs than software.

The main event was pretty decent. On both days some panel discussions had a tendency to get a bit angels-on-pinheads - the one where 4 people debated publicly about who was most "open", each using a slightly different definition of the much overused word, didn't really hold my attention. But the off-track talks really shone for me - Tom Raftery berating the industry for its at best token gestures towards environmentalism, and Regine Beatty and Atau Tanaka one-upping each other with wonderful examples of mobile frivolity. And outside of these, Ted Morgan of Skyhook talking about their business (200m location searches a day, vs 300m or so Google searches per day!) and Priya Prakash's talk on Beyond Free (an evolution of the last few sessions I've seen her do) were particularly memorable.

The venues (Barcelona Activa and ESADE) were both excellent (modulo the temperature of rooms in the former, which got quite stuffy). Now I've experienced the double-whammy of rock-solid wi-fi and power at every seat, I suspect I'm going to be a little spoilt.

More than this though, on a personal level I got a lot out of the event. It seemed to have a perfect mix of 50% familiar faces and 50% new (and friendly) ones - I'm not a natural networker, but felt very comfortable at the event. And in particular it was great to finally meet Dom and Francois of the W3C and Mike Rowehl - all of whom I've known for a while, but only in a virtual sense. It's nice to have that corrected :)

I did a couple of sessions; one on Mobile User Experience for Developer Day, which was well attended but missed the mark a little, I felt. I emphasised how we run UX alongside development at FP over and above the specifics of mobile UX, and whilst my audience seemed happy to engage on this, I think I could've either been clearer in the title for the session, or put more emphasis on tactics than on process.

The "play" panel I sat on at the very end of the event was a different matter: really good fun, and an utter privilege to talk about location-based gaming, ghost hunting, shitting and sex, generative music and digital rights issues with Professor Tanaka, Gustav Soderstrom of Spotify, Akhil Monappa of Atlas Venture, and Michael Breidenbruecker - the lovable nutter behind Last.fm and RJDJ - all ably held together by Robin Wauters of TechCrunch.

And again, on a personal note I had a very interesting chat with Ted Morgan at the post-event dinner, learning exactly what it's like to get into work one day and find a message from Steve Jobs on your voicemail :)

Thanks to Rudy, Dan, and all the organisers and behind-the-scenes folks who made it happen. I'm already looking forward to next year, though I think I might give myself an extra day in Barcelona to help recover from Sonar...

Mobile 2.0: Tom Raftery on Mobile Sustainability

greenmonk.net

Drivers for sustainability: climate change (we're all fucked) and the business case (sustainable companies tend to outperform their competitors).

ICT could reduce 15% CO2 emissions globally: through 1bn PCs, 1.2bn landlines, 1.4bn internet users, 4bn mobile users. So mobile is the target for this stuff.

Handset manufacturers are doing sod all: they all have "a green phone".

Many carriers don't mention sustainability initiatives: O2 have a reasonable site, Telefonica and 3 don't.

What are developers doing? Clearstandards have an iPhone app to calculate carbon footprint. 3rdWhale, MobiMonster also get a mention - the latter reduces energy usage of phone. But nothing really significant.

What if:

• Manufacturers made phones to last 6y not 6m? 60% of a phones carbon footprint comes from manufacture. Rent phones, don't buy them.
• Phones were made from biodegradables?
• USB chargers were standard?
• Operators switched to e-billing?
• Operators shared networks?
• Developers used mobile platform to build apps which mae a difference?
• Grid computing client apps were made for mobiles?

I wonder... How does mobile compare to PC - are phones implicitly more energy-conservative? And what specifically can developers do?

• Nice video interview with Mike Cohn, including some lovely advice on how to start getting your Scrum on. I'd thoroughly concur - try it and do it strictly for a reasonable period of time before you start to adapt it;
• I'm sure I'll have posted this before, but it's worth repeating - Jeff Patton's 12 best practices for UX in an agile environment;
• Google Bets On Big 5 - old news as this dates back to last month, but I'm reviewing it after watching the Google IO Keynote video. Very interesting indeed, but I'd take issue with their presenting this technology as "all there" - a few experiments on Firefox, Safari and Chrome on the mac seem to show that some bits are present and correct on each, others lacking. Still, very exciting stuff whatever...
• Wave. Wow, double-wow for the demo of live translation at the end.
• A study on the effectiveness of using personas in product design. Really nice to have some evidence for this stuff, though the study involved giving participants pre-prepared personas. My take would be that personas are a useful tool when based on research, but as a catalysed form of assumptions about a target audience, they can be dangerous.
• Another study, on how price affects perception.
• Interesting presentation on digital inclusion in the UK, and preconceptions we may have. "It's a case of social equity: 93% of people under 70 who have a degree are online".

I've put the slides from my talk at Mobile Web Summit 2.0 online - they're here, if you're after them.

My talk was looking at case studies of three mobile apps, two of which we'd done (Puzzler and the Ghost Detector), and one being the mighty Smule (which I've written about before). The main point I was making is that - as I was chuffed to hear Dan mention in his opening talk on day two - "all interesting mobile apps have some sort of social element". That said, this needn't involve all the classic paraphernalia of "social media" - i.e. conversations, contact management, or identity - and assuming that to be doing something social, you have to be building a branded Facebook, or a blogging platform, seems a little... crude. Audiences can be connected in more subtle ways, and as the examples of the league tables we launched for Puzzler, and the opt-in rate for Ghosty both show, these can lead to measurable increases in both uptake and loyalty.

We had fun in the panel session afterwards too, where I got to trot out a theory I've been nurturing around mobile advertising: on the web, the aim of advertising has been to drive users to useful web services, where they can get something useful done. On mobile, applications are a more appropriate destination for advertising.

Why? Mobile web sites tend to be more limited. There are a few really "sticky" ones (itsMy and Flirtomatic, I'm looking at you), but most destinations for mobile advertising are ad-supporting microsites with little long-term value for a visitor. As such, applications are a more natural and worthwhile destination for mobile advertising: give your prospective customers something genuinely useful they can carry with themselves and see value from again and again, rather than expecting them to return to a microsite.

If you're sceptical, I'd encourage you to look at iPhone app store statistics - the average free app is being run 80 times. This might not mean it's a great place to run advertising, but I'll wager that's roughly 80 times more traffic than most mobile microsites get...

Expanding the horizons of Mobile Web 2.0 to boost the developer ecosystem: An overview of the latest work and progress to move on to the next stage of evolution

"The Mobile Web is a Disruptive Innovation": this is not business as usual, we need new practices for how we develop and engage with the community.

• New markets: e.g. social networks opening up customer segments not served by web players (e.g. ItsMy);
• New players (Google, Apple);
• New business models (e.g. app stores);
• New customer expectations (UX, working out-of-the-box, sharing with friends);

We have turned a corner in the industry: as of yesterday, Dans wife is using the mobile web :) We don't need to talk about how to get people using it any more.

Current industry trends:

• Location apps and the location-based web;
• Social apps going mobile;
• Web browsers become runtimes - web as platform, more application development moves to the web with HTML5, widgets, rich APIs; this decreases fragmentation. As an agency you don't have to think separately for mobile - the same skills are transferable for PC web and mobile;
• Open source;

Clash of civilisations between web and mobile:

• Web: fast, software driven, scripting, APIs, iterative;
• Mobile: market size, scale, control points, regulation, customer ownership;

Mobile web apps

• Web has moved from page-metaphor to application metaphor;
• Mobile web is going the same way;
• Widgets are at the epicentre of mobile/web convergence;

Presents the Twiggy Widget: they got Carsonified, a web shop, to build a widget that does Twitter search.

Location is one of the most important device APIs right now. Working within W3C to build geolocation APIs for the web,

Widgets are made for the mobile web.

Ends with a personal please to end version numbering of web sites.

Panel discussion

Tim Green

Dan Appelquist

Raphael Gourmot from Orange

Sten Minor, VP of software and platforms, Sony Ericsson

TG: Dan showed a vision of web applications and open standards. How much of a hindrance can the device be, with different form factors etc. - Stan?

SM: We need to improve on standards. We have middleware, web runtimes, application ecosystems. In an ideal world you can combine these layers in ways you want. In practice you have vertical clusters (Apple). It's a nightmare to develop apps in this environment, advanced applications have to be made specifically for different clusters or across J2ME.

DA: The widget and runtime environment works well. It's easy to build an app that only makes sense in one screen size/form factor. There's skill in doing device-independent UI. There are tool chains underway to help developers here.

RG: We're helping developers with porting to devices and operating systems. Things have improved a bit, in 10 years. We still face fragmentation. W3C with device APIs runs the risk of following J2ME, with manufacturers implementing standards differently. We're working with middleware to do multi-publishing (e.g. Celsius). But who is the audience.

DA: Regarding the comparison between JSRs and web apis: there's a rabid web developer community intent of ensuring browsers support standards correctly. We need to engage early adopters and developers first, to try and bring this culture to mobile.

SM: We should differentiate on top of standards, not by supporting them.

TG: How?

SG: In services on top - not by locking in users.

DA: Users want a consistent experience when they pick up their phone too.

RG: People are buying devices for form factors, looks. Some of us might buy for features, but we're geeks. For services, differentiation is difficult: how do you do it? You update your browser on the desktop every year, but you don't tend to do this with your mobile. I'm seeing lots of single-platform developers at Orange, who want to reach beyond where they are now. To be more positive, the real benefit from the web.

Panel discussion: impact of form factors. Role of the mobile browser. Ideas on how a more open web might enable more social applications. Where does the handset company sit in a mobile-web dominated future?

Group 1: lots of industries will be trying to apply their industries to the mobile web. Look at broadcasting, say - the mass market want content from broadcasters, aren't fussed about technology. We need to be talking more to the content industry.

SM: Within Sony, there's a lot of collaboration - Sony Pictures, Music, Playstation

DA: It's always good to get the content industry involved earlier on in the standards process. It's hard to engage broadcasters in sometimes-speculative standards work, because it's not really part of their business model. The BBC is definitely on the leading edge.

RG: Content providers were very involved with standards, but it was all push-based. Now they're waiting for standards to be ready. What about DRM? The content industry want their content protected.

Group 6: We collectively wailed when standards were mentioned. The consensus was that they don't work.

DA: I completely disagree. The whole value of the web - the most succcessful interactive media ever - is interoperable standards.

Group 6: Yes, but the web is a case of an individual driving standardisation. But in a business environment the dynamic is different. Telecomms industry has thousands of useless standards.

RG: Standards covers a wide number of layers. The web industry creates upper-layer standards, transport-level layer standards are lower layers. The web industry is moving down the stack whilst the mobile industry moves up.

Q: When we talk about mobile web, we're often thinking about firing up a browser: Safari is one app on the iPhone. Need the mobile web be about the browser? Is the browser the only way to go or will individual mobile applications be it?

DA: The UX of the web runtime environment is that you invoke an application; this is the widget experience. The stock and weather widgets on the iPhone are built in this environment, but Apple don't open them to developers.

Funding the Future of Mobile Web 2.0: The Investors viewpoint in 2009 – is Mobile Web 2.0 the next growth opportunity?

Tony Fish, AMF Ventures, Angel investor

Roberto Bonzaninga, Balderton Capital

Mark Gracey, Scottish Equity

Daniel Waterhouse, Welington Partners

Hugh Fey, OpenVantage

Hugh Campbell, GP Bullhound

Moderator: Tim Green

TG: Why are you an awkard git, Tony?

TF: I'm independent so I can challenge assumptions.

TG: Give me an example of counterintuitive thinking.

TF: The last panel. Standards for applications at the edge are bollocks, driven by people who own the infrastructure.

RB: We as an industry would be better if we thought about consumers. Forget about technology, standards, consume.

TG: Why are there fewer fast-growing mobile companies in your recent list Hugh.

HC: There were 5-6 out of 50. Our table was based on revenue growth; startups in mobile are struggling to deliver this here. Mobile advertising is shot for the next 18 months.

TG: Is it getting harder to generate investment interest?

HC: It's hard for mobile, software and content businesses to raise money right now. VCs have made bets which didn't work out and it's a tough ecosystem for a young company - very busy value chain, problems getting a big enough revenue cut to support yourself.

MG: We've invested in Surfkitchen for longer than we would've liked and they've been through ups and downs. In the last few years we've seen interest in this company grow, operators have long-running projects that have wasted money - they want valuable companies to help them transition to what the iPhone has done. It's tough for startups in mobile infrastructure as well as apps.

DW: The investment community has been scarred by history - mobile gaming, music, LBS have all unravelled in a bad way with few success stories. The ecosystem is improving but there's hesitancy.

TG: Do investors hunt in packs?

TF: No. Mobile has to interface with lots of other things. To talk about it in itself is naive. The industry is scarred because operators promised lots of data consumption and failed to deliver: people create more than they consume. This is where mobile is relevant.

DW: I'm not seeing mobile being an adjunct to the web service. We invest in Qype who have a simple iPhone app contributing a significant percentage of content to the service, though still a small number of users.

RB: VCs are guilty of a bit of homogenous thinking. We need to look at things with fresh eyes: the world changes, ecosystems change.

HC: If you'd have taken the Crazy Frog to an investment committee, it wouldn't have gotten funded.

MG: Jamba wouldn't have made it past our investment committee.

TG: What's the current situation like, in terms of quantity of available funding, and approaches from mobile startups.

RB: We've started a new $100m fund. I spend a lot of time on mobile startups. We don't see much truly new stuff. I'm a bit disappointed that Twitter was created in San Francisco - we had SMS here for years. But today it's exciting that When we look at something, it's not about what I, or operators, think... it's about what consumers think. You can see consumer traction - we can be wrong, but the consumer is normally right. We see lots of small startups, 1 or 2 guys with 1m downloads.

TF: There are fewer startups now, I'm happy about this. We've stopped seeing the same startups come back again and again. Folks are leaving corporates with good ideas.

RB: From an investment POV, App Stores have given us data to work with as to what users are downloading. There's money in the big funds in Europe, but we need great ideas!

TG: Are companies coming with next-generation ideas, or ideas for folks with feature-phones or with wide distribution across the world?

MG: On-device portal is a dirty word these days, it's v operator-centric terminology. We're seeing a lot of companies, but the plans are more plausible. Applications have been proven. It's easy to test, tweak and improve businesses; to invest less and see how it goes.

Q: What areas of the value chain, and what subsectors, do you think are most interesting for investment?

TF: Don't care. Is the market big enough, can it work, is there an exit?

HC: Mobile communities is an area seeing tremendous growth, there's so many interesting things here. Micropayments, smart ad tracking,

RB: As a fund, we don't think like that. OpenVantage are using an old technology; it's the consumer proposition that's working. I think less about the space they're in, and more about the proposal. But it's time to do disruptive consumer propositions now.

HF: Yes, VCs hunt in packs. City events last year made things tighter, valuations are lower. The technology doesn't matter; we're supporting the accessibility and support of spontaneity. We bring this to sports betting.

Q: How many mobile investments do you expect to make this year, when did you last do a new investment?

DW: Last time was 6m ago, first question don't know: we don't have an allocation.

MG: Twice this year. Again, we have no allocation.

RB: Same for us; last one is *now*, we're closing a round. No quotas for us.

TF: 60 days ago.

Q: What's the one thing you'd like to see change in the industry to help you invest more:

RB: Consumers.

TG: What's the most common mistake.

RF: Operator deal: that one deal will change the world. I'd like operators broken back down to providing capacity.

Beyond SMS voting - mapping the future of Mobile Media 2.0

Barry Houlihan, CEO, MIG

SMS voting isn't happening in the UK right now, but the future is optimistic.

MIG: 120 staff, £65m revenue, organic growth, no funding. Freemantle Media, Comic Relief, etc.

Jigsaw: mobile interactivity agency, doing mass-participation in the UK. NewToy, a live experience technology agency.

Kilrush: mobile internet publishing platform, making it easy to integrate mobile with web. Drag and drop, feeds, etc., to help team build services easily.

Walkers crisps activity geneated 60/40 activity in favour of mobile, all by SMS.

47% of all written communication between 15-24yo is by text.
UK consumers send 28 textx messages a week, only make 20 calls.
24-44 year olds are 70% of UK mobile browsing.
67% of the UK mobile browsing internet in the UK is male.

Freemantle aren't seeing a return on their mobile content investments, and are publicly saying they're going to cut back. Endemol have said their biggest challenge is working with application providers: ensuring that apps deliver engagement.

Are You Ahead of Time? A Crowdsourced Vision of Mobile Media, Monty C M Metzget

An interactive session....

I forgot to post about BOGFest - Brighton Outdoor Gaming Festival, the inaugural event of which was held last weekend in Brunswick Square - curated by Richard Vahrman of Locomatrix fame.

There was a programme of events running all afternoon; after a diary clash with a 5th birthday party, I managed to make it along at 4, missing Tai Chi Twister and Clock the Doc but arriving just in time to kick off some games of Fruit Farmer, one of the Locomatrix formats.

It was really interesting seeing Real People playing Fruit Farmer. We cheated completely, of course, and presented each player with a phone and GPS unit that had been preconfigured with the application installed - in real life they'd have to do this themselves, which we know to be a bit of a barrier (though the geocaching crowd seem to use applications on occasion, so it's not completely out of the question).

We had 6 pairs of players run off for a game. All bar one of the pairs managed to locate themselves quickly and orient themselves against the on-screen map - working out what direction they had to run in to do anything useful. A few players noted that their position was a little laggy, and we were slightly embarrassed to find out that the game layout we'd chosen for the day was slightly too large for the playing area - meaning that players would've had to climb onto the roofs of local buildings to collect a few of the larger pieces of fruit. Memo to self: next time, check map first.

But that said, players seemed to enjoy the game - particularly some of our younger participants:

Also throughout the day we had some treasure hunts running, a scavenger hunt at the end of the day, and Tristan brought along his Hunt the Wumpus QR-code game - he's written a great post on how it went for him, which you can find here.

Time constraints meant that I never got to show off ArchaeoloGPS, the game I've been doodling with recently. Perhaps next year... :)

MEX: Sian Townsend, Google

Going to talk about 5 elements of a successful emerging market strategy. Personal views, with examples from Google.

What happens when you hand someone a mobile and say "you can ask a question and get an answer"?

In East Africa...

Want to know how ebola is spread. If HIV can be cured. What drug is best for malaria. How to stop vines wilting. Whether panadol effects outcome of an HIV test. Why tomatoes wilt. Why feet smell.

Local solutions to local problems.

Sian is a user experience researcher at Google, focused on mobile search, internationally. Background in HCI and development politics.

1. Don't presume you know the answers.

Search has been rolled out in African languages and by SMS. "Suggest in Swahili" was launched last week, getting around problems with user input.

2. Collaborate

G mapped lots of African countries that hadn't been mapped at all. Where we don't have data we encourage others to contribute. We allow users to create maps themselves. Local users can annotate areas and contribute data really well.

With search, we have "Google in your language" - 38 languages translated by locals.

3. Take a long term view

Google works with universities to nurture cutting edge research; runs competitions to challenge students and understand what kind of content appetites new users in the domain have - letting them show us the way forward.

Invested in infrastructure, improving connectivity. Google.org is another avenue for them to get involved. A broad strategy; "a rising tide lifts all boats"

4. Understand user needs

Research from Uganda. Localising your own product may be missing the point - you might benefit from doing something new, and strategic user research is the way to find out if this is the case.

Right now, most Google searches are W. Europe and N. America. Mobile will be the future; but it's messy and not a simple case of "just moving everything over". In Africa, designing mobile products is tough: simple devices, few data plans, widespread prepay. There's v little digital content - even with fantastic connectivity, what will you search for in your local language if nothing's digitised?

Research project in E Africa: 4 weeks ethnographic research by an academic, focus groups showing 20 concepts through a network of village phone operators, and a Wizard of Oz experiment (where you don't know if you're talking to a human or a machine). A social impact assessment ran alongside all of these to ensure we were being socially responsible.

Wizard of Oz experiment was about exploring local content appetites, collecting data quickly and evaluating mobile as a channel. Set up a control centre, trained 12 field researchers to go out into the field: 17 locations, let end-users ask questions. They used Frontline SMS and a GSM Modem to gather messages and respond to health questions.

Queries revealed rich insights. Multi-linguistic teams were used to ensure questions were asked in a language the asker was comfortable using. Manually matched up conversations to do analysis (quantitative data), they mapped the research data into user journeys to get qualitative data.

Built prototypes off the back of this, going into product pilots. Tested, learned, iterated - particularly important for SMS products where you have to spend a lot of time analysing logs to look for synonyms etc.

They will be launching a suite of products off the back of this research.

5. Embrace local ingenuity

With the best intentions, designs done by outsiders can be subverted - this is OK and is one of the exciting things about emerging markets. Some villages, for instance, don't have a local phone - enterprising businessfolks buy a phone and drive it around these villages in a bike.

Shows an "analog blogger" - guy who has a network of news reporters. He writes it on a chalk board and has customers come and view it. He runs advertising on the board :)

Q: How did literacy play a part in your studies? Were maps the way that people represented space in African cultures?

A: The only way to discover this is by giving someone a phone. Government statistics aren't as reliable as seeing what people want to do and how they do it. On maps: don't know, I'm focused on search. My guess would be that lots of people use other representations.

MEX: Mobile Mandate, Robert, Frog Design

We've been collectively frustrated by the gap between aspirations and reality. What are the most meaningful things that we can touch with the device - areas like healthcare, education?

Robert tells a story about Zinny (sp?) - AIDS sufferer admitted to hospital, one of the first few to be put on an ARV programmer who recovered. She started an organisation with a Harvard-trained doctor to run a treatment and education programme in S. Africa.

Talks about ARV projects which are complex to manage - information and help is needed to manage tests and treatment, and they're falling behind. Most people come in for tests when they're already in a poor condition: low survival rate, difficulty in completing any ARV programme.

The system right now doesn't work for them. They need to reach more people - not the 120k folks they're working with now, but the 40% of the population of the local area at risk.

They get leverage through mobile technologies. How can they use mobile to reach out, get people to test, and encourage them to stick with treatment?

Launched 2008 with a mobile outreach campaign. 80-90% of S.Africa have access to a mobile, 90% prepay. They have an SMS-like service, 6 free messages/day when you run out of minutes that let you send a v short message for a phone number: the message being "please call me". There's a bit of spare space in these messages. They got the second-largest operator to donate 5% of its inventory of this space (priced at $250,000 p.a. - not bad for reaching a million people a day). That's a million messages containing worthwhile AIDS/HIV information, "the worlds biggest field trial of mobile health technology".

Wow.

This is the *only* way to reach these people. Next step: testing and ongoing support.

There's a huge revolution in low-cost diagnostics. The kits are routinely stolen and cost $18 apiece - there's a huge demand for them.

Mobile is not one channel, it's many. What about voicemail - 90s of audio delivered into mailboxes for free, e.g. a message from Nelson Mandela encouraging them to test. You need a model that brings these today (this sounds like the "seams" topic we covered at Future of Mobile last year).

Instructions on the kits are paired with numbers you can call for support at each step. How do we keep people aware throughout? With various calls to action. A local record label had its stars endorse and get tested at the hospital - ensuring this was seen as a locally supported campaign. They user-tested instructions on young men getting HIV tested for the first time.

Frogs US clients are desperately interested in this too - getting people to actively engage with healthcare.

What's missing? Good design. People need feedback. It's not about haptic feedback and rich media. We need partnerships - with Nokia, Nike, anyone with vested interests in these markets.

Frog is committing to one catalyst project per year in mobile health. Currently considering: depression/mood support, social willpower, counterfeit drugs.

• Using an Agile Software Process with Offshore Development by Martin Fowler;
• Industry trends in prototyping by Dave Cronin;
• Kaizen and Kaikaku, an analysis of where agile adoptions go wrong. Happy to report we went Kaikaku;
• Flaccid Scrum, for the title alone;
• Fascinating set of user interface principles for Palm WebOS;
• More wisdom from Jeff Patton on product owners and product design;
• Web Programming Is Hard, via ATobe;
• Dougie passed on Programming Sucks;
• Continuous Deployment: now there's a good target;
• One Free Interaction, a wonderful essay from the Cooper Journal;
• Recreating the Button, a painstaking investigation of the redesign of web buttons for Google;
• Scrum is not about engineering practices;
• Continuing the life tracking theme, BedPosted - a site for you to track your sexual encounters with;

I seem to have been banned from the WMLProgramming mailing list, ending the 9 or so years that I've spent there. I'm not entirely sure why - my last posts there weren't particularly controversial, pointing out that lots of transcoder products include features to add navigation bars; and suggesting that the developer community engage more with operators to minimise the damage done by irresponsible deployments.

Most likely, the list moderator (Luca Passani) has lost patience with me. Luca, I, and others have been debating lots of the issues around transcoding over the last 6 months. We frequently disagree on the detail of how to approach it, though when it comes to the basics I've long felt that we're in agreement: this is a serious problem and one that needs to be dealt with. My willingness to debate the issue politely with Luca has led to my being categorised a "bad faith arguer" - the implication being that I don't actually believe the points I'm putting forward, but choose to do so to annoy or otherwise aggravate.

Absolute poppycock, of course. I'm saying this stuff - and putting my own time into the W3C MWBP Group - because I actually believe it (and have done for some time). Despite what Luca might wish to present, like many complex issues this isn't black and white, but nuanced: there are many opinions, and many subtleties. Recently I've been disagreeing with Luca on the likelihood that, say, OpenWave develop features in their products that they promise to never deploy. Do this mean I blindly support transcoder vendors in what they're doing? No - at the same time I'm arguing with Charles of Opera that transcoding of HTTPS links is dangerous from a security perspective.

The standards of acceptable behaviour on WMLProgramming seem one-sided. On the one hand it's acceptable to call the W3C participants "fuckers" or "assholes", those who debate with you "collaborationists" and "morons", or transcoder vendors "arrogant bastards that need to be treated as the beasts they are". It's considered an adult approach to "keep telling them how much we hate them until they don't cease and desist". It's OK to call the W3C fuckers "because they deserved it". And arguing in bad faith is only possible, it seems, if you're on the other side of the table from Luca.

At the same time it's unacceptable to politely and repeatedly disagree with Luca on these issues. When I do so, it appears that I become the enemy; it's asserted that I'm only arguing to distract from the issue, my motivations are questioned, it's snidely insinuated that I might be on the payroll of operators or transcoder vendors... all fairly childish and unpleasant stuff, and not a tactic that's confined to me (an ex-Vodafone employee expressing an opinion, for instance, was dismissed as a "troll")

This double-standard is annoying to have to deal with, but I worry that when this childish and abusive view is presented as being representative of the "development community" (if there is such a thing), it does us all harm. I find it embarrassing to be associated with: this is not how I want my position presented publicly, and I know I'm not alone in thinking there must be a more adult way to discuss these issues. I don't accept the line that the seriousness of the issue justifies a "no holds barred" approach: governments debate much more serious problems (nuclear proliferation, say), without resorting to name-calling.

When Luca threatened to ban me a couple of months back, I was touched to see a few messages of support pop up on the list, asking him to reconsider. At the same time I've been told off-list that at least one message of support didn't make it onto the list. It looks like there's some level of censorship going on, without accountability or objectivity. Dissenting views are important for debate, and we're unlikely to persuade the transcoder industry to self-regulate without talking to them about it. To this end a place where all parties can meet and discuss openly in a civilised environment is important: I don't think WMLProgramming is that place.

All of the above is a bit sad really - WMLProgramming is a collection of some very knowledgeable and talented folks, and with write access removed I'll be unable to contribute, or to correct some of the more outlandish assertions that pop up there with worrying frequency. At the same time, I'll have a bit more spare time (which is welcome right now) and a reason to investigate some of the other fine mobile development resources out there like mobiforge or the BetaVine forums. I'd be interested to hear about any others that might be lurking out there...