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November 25, 2007

Tile Optimization - The Next Frontier in Web Marketing?

The New York Times today has an article on user experience on mobile phones — or the lack thereof.

I think it overstates a bit the user experience problems with the mobile web. The iPhone has a pretty kick ass interface, and the lack of Flash capability has never been a problem for me. I actually have Flash disabled on my desktop's FireFox browser (using FlashBlock), just because Flash tends to slow the browsing experience so much.

The article also discusses software created by Zumobi which breaks the surfing experience into interactive tiles (demo here, in Flash, natch) which can be preloaded on the phone, downloaded from partner sites, or swapped between users.

The demo looks great, except I'm not sure how it's different than just having 16 bookmarks stored on your browser with the stuff you like. Sure, it's animated and graphical, but is it really not just bookmarks on steroids?

Most likely I just don't fully understand it yet. The tiles do need to be built (using the Zumobi SDK), they're not automatically generated by the Zumobi software. If this tile-based approach takes off, getting your site "tiled" could be a significant part of your business's online promotion effort.

My hunch is that iPhone's approach, in which the phone accommodates the web as it is (minus Flash, for now) rather than the web being modified to accommodate the phone, is what will win out in the long-term.

But Zumobi does have some cool-looking software. I wish them all the luck in anything they can do to improve the mobile browsing experience.

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