Members Only Please!

One interesting mobile phenomenon is the growing number of iPhone specific sites. Facebook, Meebo, Amazon, Google and others have come out with custom tailored sites for the new device.

So this brings up a question going back to the original hype of the iPhone. "It is just the internet..." seems to imply that there is no need for custom iPhone sites, you should be able to browse to the regular web page. So why is it that we see this growing trend? Is this trend an indication that the mobile web will splinter and an iPhone-only branch of mobile content will emerge?

You could argue that this is bad and instead of moving towards some type of unification of mobile content, the iPhone is creating a proprietary branch of the mobile web that will become a "members only" club. I’m not sure this argument totally holds up since everything on the iPhone seems to be based on standards. Any non-iPhone device could browse to an iPhone optimized site, though I’m not sure why you would want to.

Another branch of this argument is that iPhone optimized sites are only being done as a marketing ploy since it is probably true that the underlying content offered on the iPhone site is the same as that offered on the web site or existing mobile site. Why have an iPhone site when you can do the exact same thing on the full site?

I personally think the iPhone optimized sites are a good thing. It serves as a motivator for the content creation industry to think about ways to deliver future content that is fun and exciting, and is delivered in a fidelity that matches the capabilities of the target device. I also believe that people are expecting a different context when they are mobile. Given a choice between navigating to the full site, or one to which understands you are on the go, most will gravitate toward what is fun and easy. "Mobile" is the user, not the device.

I’m sure the motivation by big companies is partly "marketing hype" but it is based on a principle universal to all economies: "they who get the most eye-balls win". So if the mega-mobile marketing companies want to build iPhone specific sites, more power to them. In the long run it should be good for all of us.

Now, what if the iPhone-only sites really enforced "iPhone-only" by doing device detection and excluding all other devices except iPhones? Then I would consider that to be the private club syndrome not totally unlike what IE tried to do in the past.

Undoubtedly there will be other iPhone like clones coming to the market in the near future. The UI features of these devices will also help push the content creation process to the next level. If another iPhone like device emerges with great popularity, it will be interesting to see if the same companies that are now creating iPhone-only sites, will respond in the same way for these new devices.