Mobile is Where the Growth Is

One factor assisting 'mobile' right now is that SEO is less pervasive - mobile apps are focussed on UX which desktop webapps long ago ditched to get rankings (ramming as much content on page as possible, overusing keywords, reviews, ratings, UGC etc.).<p>I'm finding many mobile apps simple/clean to use - although the 'responsive design' movement is diluting that.

Mobile is not a single view / Market / technology<p>The post sort of implies smartphone == mobile, but with African mobiles being used to transfer scrip, Indian phones already having good SMS based payment models, there are multiple models, markets and a lot of cultural sensitivities<p>The one preditiom I can make is there will be no more global phenomenon - one website taking off everywhere. Even just tacking on a new tld will not fix the local differences that mobile adoption is bringing<p>Basically people adopted themselves to the web cos it was so useful and new. But mobile phones get adapted to people.

I wrote a reaction to this article: <a href="http://www.douban.com/note/223029237/" rel="nofollow">http://www.douban.com/note/223029237/</a><p>The gist of it is that APIs will become more important, and that they shouldn't stay as poorly designed as they are today. I try to think about how an API design could look like git's architecture.

<i>"The ads are the default content object (the tweet) and are delivered right in the primary user experience (the feed/timline)."</i><p>True, but this is also why it's annoying.

<i>That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps. Messenger, Instagram (not yet owned by Facebook), and Camera are the model for Facebook on mobile.</i><p>I don't understand the complaint about Facebook not being mobile-ready. When I was on it, the mobile fb app worked almost as well as the regular website. That's how I'm guessing most users want the damn thing to work, the same across every platform and not fragmented because, well, it's on a phone. I'm trying to figure out why everyone thinks they're a non-entity on mobile.

Great post. I think one of the most interesting aspects of this is payments.<p>Throughout the history of the web most services and content has been free to consumers and support with ad revenue. But on mobile consumers are much more willing to pay and it is almost completely frictionless.<p>I wonder if in the next few years we will start to see more and more apps using the subscription model. If Facebook was started today as a mobile first business would they charge for the app outright, charge $1 per month, or use in-app purchase to charge for extra features?<p>NB: I first posted this comment on the blog

This post is great but it speaks primarily to B2C.<p>B2B market will still be desktop/web based exactly because of the mobile apps being more features than actual applications.

"There is a significant shift going on this year, much more significant than we saw last year, from web to mobile"<p>what? so these mobile apps do not use the web?

Love this post. Monetization on mobile, as shown by Facebook's struggle to do well, is the next code to crack. I agree that as users are on mobile in a very focused state of mind, they are not open to advertisements, in particular not those that are in the way of achieving a goal. Subscription, in-app purchase might be better, also when users become more aware of the fact that if they are using a free service, they themselves are part of the offering being sold to the companies paying the bill.

I will continue to beat this drum:<p>Mobile is not <i>just</i> the web.<p>If you are thinking mobile first, you should be building network applications, not web applications.<p>Fred Wilson is just an example of someone who get this.

Well you can't argue with that. But what says you can't build a successful business around the web? Why can't you build a successful business with a desktop application?

SEO is dead. Mobile IS THE FUTURE.<p>I used to create simple websites, do some SEO and get thousands of visit daily and now its impossible. Regular link building its dead nowadays.<p>So, building freemium apps IS the future.