One of the trends which is becoming apparent is that more and more mobile web users prefer to access the same content they are used to on desktop. A HackerNews fan? You’re going to want to read the same articles in the mobile setting. Popularity of Facebook Mobile and Mobify-powered sites like iLoveTypography (http://m.ilovetypography.com) and CSS Tricks (http://m.css-tricks.com) is another testament to this.
This also means that proven link sharing mechanisms like Twitter apply on mobile. A mobile user will attempt to click the links in their twitter stream, usually to be disappointed with slow loading times and bad rendering. What’s more shocking is that most mobile sites and iPhone apps are useless when referred to by Twitter, as the matching URL structure and proper redirection are missing. Similar thing occurs in mobile search, except Google can be a bit smarter about routing mobile users to mobile destination.
Here is an example – CNN has a mobile site, both in generic and iPhone flavours. Here’s a link to their current headline news story:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/05/11/namibia.race/index.html
Navigate to this link on mobile and nothing changes. This is CNN we’re talking about – a company that heavily invests into mobile is absolutely unprepared to the social media angle of it. It’s not because they’re clueless – it’s hard to engineer a full mobile view for an evolved CMS, where mobile users seamlessly get an optimized rendering of any internal URL.
Mobify solves this problem, as the URL of the source site is fully mapped to the mobile view with any of our redirect options.
My favourite example is Vancouver’s TechVibes which broadcasts on Twitter heavily. All the links open up the corresponding mobile views, thanks to Mobify!
