Current(ish) Smartphone Use

I regularly come across reports and studies that talk about how smartphones are a growing platform, outpacing PCs in some markets and/or demographics, essentially re-writing how we use the web. Most of those reports lack hard data or lack solid analysis of that data, however, and fall prey to best guesses from the authors. Today I am linking to three different perspectives and letting you suss them out.

Opera Software, maker of the Opera Mini web browser, conducted an anonymous survey of its Opera Mini users and managed to capture feedback from 300,000 users (State of the Mobile Web, July 2010). The trick here is understanding that the results in the Opera survey are from users who are already online, using smartphones, and have a phone with Opera Mini. Given the number of iPhone users who responded and given that iPhone does not come with Opera pre-installed, it's fair to conclude that the majority of those users are a bit more skilled (or interested) than your average user. The Opera survey found a climb among female users at a pace faster than the climb in male users. Female users still aren't caught up, making up about 23% of the mobile web population. It's interesting to wade through their data to review the 10 most visited sites in a few countries, with Facebook and Google clearly near the top of the pile in the English-speaking countries. The report is worth reviewing just to see the data. While Opera Mini users are a targeted group, 300,000 people is still a good sample size to draw some general conclusions.

Mashable published a less in-depth report, supported by the Samsung Galaxy. There is some interesting data in the article, but some of the analysis is sparse, and in some cases doesn't feel like it hit the mark. It doesn't help that the data comes from late 2009 through January 2010. It focuses on North America and Europe and finds that the UK, France and Germany lead Europe in smartphone adoption rates. The article reminds us that adoption rates aren't the same as overall market penetration — a country with one user that gets a second user sees a 100% adoption rate increase, but no discernible different in the adoption rate. This puts The US above the UK and France for overall penetration, regardless of the difference in adoption rates. This adoption rate growth may simply be a function of cheaper plans. I find the title of the article a bit misleading, too: Why Smartphone Adoption May Not Be as Big as You Think.

This piece from the New York Times, Asia Poised to Transform Global Smartphone Market, takes a different approach. After reading the previous two reports, reading this article provided context for those numbers and assumptions. With my limited time bouncing around Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, my own anecdotal experiences seem to mesh with some of the statements in this article and frame the numbers cited in the other two pieces pretty well. The discussion of the competition among hardware makers and even mobile networks helps give insight I didn't have. For example, the iPhone has had trouble in China because China's largest (and government-owned) cell provider uses a standard not supported by the iPhone. Instead, the iPhone has been remanded to China's second-largest (and government-owned) cell provider, losing access to 544 million customers. This opened the door for the OPhone, based on Android. While not rife with hard numbers, the article gives some context to numbers from the Opera study, and gives us some new ways to look at the analysis from Mashable.

In case you missed the links in the paragraphs above:

• State of the Mobile Web, July 2010, August 2010 at Opera.


• Why Smartphone Adoption May Not Be as Big as You Think, August 26, 2010 at Mashable.


• Asia Poised to Transform Global Smartphone Market, June 14, 2010 from New York Times.

Related

• Mobile Internet Use Continues Climb

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Speaking: Accessible Web Apps & Standards

I will be speaking twice in September, both of them sponsored by Infotech Niagara. If you're in the Buffalo area, these are great opportunities to boost my ego and watch me cruise abandoned plates for food.

Developing Coding Standards

The first event is Developing Coding Standards, where I will be a panelist tackling the role of W3C standards in web sites and web applications. This event is Tuesday, September 14 from 8:30am to 10:30am in the Knox Room at the Buffalo Niagara Partnership offices. The breakdown:

We've all heard of standards such as ISO, W3C and others, but how many developers genuinely support them? And what do developers do within their own organizations for internal standards? Join our panelists to discuss how development standards streamline your process and result in greater efficiency and savings for everyone.

We'll be taking a look at the issue from different perspectives and
welcoming your questions. Continental breakfast will be provided.

Register online.

Building Accessible Web Applications

The second event is Building Accessible Web Applications, where I will be speaking about supporting users with disabilities. This event is Tuesday, September 21 from 8:30am to 10:30am in the Knox Room at the Buffalo Niagara Partnership offices. The scoop on this one:

As more and more companies do business with the general public online, web-based applications have become the main customer service experience for its customers. Supporting users with disabilities is not only good karma, it enables customers who have vision impairments, physical limitations, and even supports our growing web-enabled senior population.

Join infoTech Niagara and Adrian Roselli from Algonquin Studios for a presentation on Building Accessible Web Applications. Learn all the tricks of the trade and ask any questions you might have. Continental breakfast will be provided.

Register online.

Location

Both events are at Buffalo Niagara Partnership, 665 Main Street, Suite 200, Buffalo, New York 14203 (map below). BNP has parking information at its web site.

View Larger Map

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More on Hover vs. Touch

If you are an avid reader of my blog (and you are, aren't you?) then you might recall when I wrote the article UX Challenges in Touch Interfaces over at evolt.org. I discussed how users have become accustomed to using mice and developers have become accustomed to designing for the mouse. Ultimately this results and smaller and smaller clickable elements and hidden features or messages that only reveal themselves when the mouse cursor wanders their way.

Less than a week after my article went up, another article with a tighter focus on the hover state of the web appeared: Non Hover. The article references the (impossible to use in a desktop browser) reference from Apple, Preparing Your Web Content for iPad as the official statement from Apple that mouse-related script or styles won't work on its devices.

The article continues to discuss potential issues with relying on the mouse, and offers some general strategies to cope with its absence as you as a developer continue to build web sites and/or web applications. In particular, the article gives us a list of things to avoid:

• Hyperlinks that aren't 100% obvious


• Javascript tooltips that show important information or metadata


• Displaying action items on hover. Examples I've seen typically involve edit / delete items.


• Displaying graphics in a less-than-ideal state until hovered: all those semi-opaque or black & white screenshots and photos that only display full color when covered by a cursor


• Drop-down menus. While some of these can be revealed on click or tap, be sure the user has cues that show those options.


• Focusing too much on hover dependent CSS3. I know it's a bit of a heartbreaker, but while these have always been seen as enhancements, we're going to have to settle with the fact that multi-touch users won’t be seeing our fancy transitions.

Add these tips with the items I outline in my article, and you should be well on your way to building for the world of touch screens without losing your mind.

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UB School of Management Talk: Social Media in Business

Last night I had the pleasure to speak to a class from the University at Buffalo School of Management about social media use in business. It gave me an opportunity to distill my experiences with clients and as a consumer into a far-reaching discussion in under three hours. Hardly any of them fell asleep.

Given how quickly the world of social media changes, I wanted to discuss examples in the real world that aren't just fads or otherwise out of date in fifteen minutes. I wanted to find some grounded examples and discussions. While we covered a lot of territory, the links below represent some examples I brought that, being older than 6 months, have stood some minimum test of time in an otherwise constantly evolving industry.

Corporate Social Media Policies at Adrian Roselli's blog (that's me!), September 21, 2009. Pay attention to how the US Air Force wrote a policy for addressing blog posts that mention the USAF.

Conference Humiliation: They're Tweeting Behind Your Back at The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17, 2009. A terrible PowerPoint slide starts the chaos, a tipping point takes it to a trending topic on Twitter, Cafe Press shirts are up for sale within 1.5 hours — while the speaker is still on stage.

Lots of Twitter Followers Guarantees... Nothing written by me (again) at evolt.org, January 5, 2010. If you count success by who follows you, then you cannot count.

ROI: How to Measure Return on Investment in Social Media at Social Media Today, February 22, 2010. Same rules, different metrics.

Expanding Connections with Customers Through Social Media, from the Dell blog (December 8, 2009). Thanks to Twitter use, Dell pulled in an additional $6.5 million globally as of December.

NetSetJet, built by a local All-You-Can-Jetter, supporting the #AYCJ Jet Blue community. Jet Blue pays nothing for this service, showing it can leverage social media well enough to enable a community to spring up on its own.

@BPCares is an example of British Petroleum having to make a tough decision (for traditional companies) — let the fake account stand, or try to sue it into oblivion.

If you were in the class last night, then you might have already seen the Social Media Revolution video, so up top I have dropped in the What the F**k is Social Media NOW? slide show. Just in case you were wondering.

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Securing Facebook Places (from Your Friends)

Facebook Places is out. It's the Foursquare / Gowalla / Brightkite / Loopt / etc.-killer. Or so Facebook hopes. All of those services have some pretty clear controls in place to limit how much information you share. Granted, you can mess up even their simple privacy controls and share the address of your Mom's house with the town crazy (assuming he/she is technical enough to use the software, and cares), but at least the model is simple. Facebook, on the other hand, has gotten (earned) quite the reputation for having convoluted security screens that make it way to easy for the average user to expose more than intended. Facebook Places takes it a step further and can allow your own Facebook friends to announce your location to the world.

Instead of reformulating something I've already written (making smart choices about what you share from the physical world), I'll just link you there (Don't Let Social Media Get You Robbed (or Stalked)) and instead outline how you can change the security settings in Facebook to protect your information. To be fair, Facebook just launched this feature yesterday, so you can expect it to change over time. You may want to review your security settings in Facebook on a regular basis.

There are two sets of instructions below, each with a set of screen shots. Make sure you go through both. Click the screen shots for the full size image.

Adjust Check-in Visibility, Disable "Friend Check-Ins" and "Here Now"

1. Choose Privacy Settings from the Account menu (upper right).


2. Choose Customize Settings.


3. Adjust Places I check in to what you prefer (I suggest no more than "Friends only").


4. Uncheck the box next to Include me in "People here now" after I check in.


5. Choose "Disabled" from the Friends can check me in to places menu.

Preventing Your Friends' Apps from Accessing Your Places Info

1. Choose Privacy Settings from the Account menu (upper right).


2. Choose Edit your settings from under the "Applications and websites" section on the bottom left.


3. Click the Edit settings button from the "Information accessible through your friends" section.


4. Uncheck Places I've visited.


5. Don't forget to Save Changes.

And with that you should be locked down. Remember, though, check it now and then. Make sure new items haven't been added or things haven't changed.

Related

• Don't Let Social Media Get You Robbed (or Stalked) on this very blog.


• Facebook Places: Your Friends Are Here, But What About Your Privacy? from the ACLU.


• A Field Guide to Using Facebook Places at Mashable.


• Facebook Places Makes Location a Commodity at ReadWriteWeb.

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Enough about the Death of the Web

Wired Magazine released an article on its web site yesterday, The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet, that basically states that the web we've all grown to rely on for nearly twenty years is on its way out. There has been a lot of chatter about this over the last 24 hours, including an article on Boing Boing, Is the web really dead?

The points in Wired's article are pretty simple. It cites examples of services we use all day over the internet that are not the web but are instead served through apps. A Twitter app, a Foursquare app, a Netflix app, a Skype app, and so on. This isn't terribly surprising given that the bulk of these services are better served through a dedicated interface. A couple years ago, these companies would have had to rely on a web browser as their delivery platform, but given the rise of mobile devices (which are outpacing desktop computer use), the (mobile) web browser has proved to be an inefficient solution. So the app model came to bear out the features of these services, bolstered by the Apple app model.

But that does not mean the web is going or gone. We are at a point, and have been for quite a while, that not having a web page for your company (or even self) is akin to living in a shuttered shack in the back woods. Not using the web is like admitting that you are a secret Amish spy. There is an expectation from users that the web will always be there, that the web is an open sea of information chaos. This is not something you can access from just any app and is therefore not something that will just go away. I see it unlikely that users will download a Wikipedia app, or that small site owners will build apps to serve their content to a non-web-browser set of platforms. The ubiquity of HTML and web browsers will keep the web around for a long time to come.

These aren't the points people are debating. The crux of the chatter on the web is all about the use of the web today. This chart shows the decline of the web (the big red area on the bottom) pretty steadily since 2000, along with the decline of every other internet service except video. This is what people are keying into — the pretty picture and the headline.

Boing Boing looked at this chart and recognized that the numbers were relative, that showing the web as declining was false when considering the overall growth in traffic (the average reader should have clued in when seeing the decline of everything except video). Using the same source that Wired used for its chart, Boing Boing recast the chart using total internet traffic as the vertical axis, removing the relative nature of the graph, and produced this:

As we can see, web traffic has in fact been on the rise.

These two charts essentially settle the issue that most people have been asking about — is the web really on the decline? The short answer is that no, it is not. The longer, more involved answer is that, as Wired points out, other aspects of the internet are poised to chip away at the ubiquity of the web as the be-all end-all resource for all users.

It's unfair to view the Wired article strictly in the light of actual current use, but Wired did choose the title for a reason. It certainly got people talking, at least until another meme comes along today and sweeps it away.

Related

Speaking of research (I'm looking at you, interwebs users):

• Facebook Doesn't Make You Smarter, Rigorous Research Does.

Update (Sept. 14, 2010): Found this on the innertubes today. While it mostly lambastes Wired and skips the discussion of the "web is dead" meme, it's kind of funny and is an entertaining look at journalism:

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Net Neutrality as Seen by Google and Verizon

In the last week there has been a lot of speculation over a deal Google and Verizon were working on regarding net neutrality. First covered by New York Times, refuted in part by Google and Verizon, and later presented as a policy document from Google and Verizon, quite a lot of chatter has been going on all over the web.

In the last 24 to 48 hours, I have seen many Twitter shots, snarky blog posts, and general incredulity over the Google/Verizon proposal. Not nearly as many people appear to have read the full proposal as are commenting, however. On top of that, there is some confusion about what net neutrality means as a concept versus what it means as adopted by the FCC in the United States.

Given the recent ruling in the Comcast / FCC fight back in April, the FCC may be looking like a lame duck to some and there is fear that Google and Verizon might be stepping into the fight while the FCC is bloodied. If you missed the ruling, here's the gist from Reuters:

Comcast also defended its practice of blocking services like BitTorrent, saying it was trying to manage Web traffic flowing over its network to prevent degradation of service for the majority of its users. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia sided with Comcast and said that the FCC failed to show that it had the necessary authority to impose such restrictions on the provider's network operations.

Pile this on with an observation from Engadget, and it makes sense that now is the time for Verizon and Google to move in and try to assert themselves:

What's interesting is that the announcement comes just few days after the FCC declared its closed-door net-neutrality meetings with ISPs and other interested parties to be dead — it's odd for Google and Verizon to claim their new proposal is just an extension of their joint statement in general support of net neutrality from last October when it's very clearly an articulation of a specific plan that was undoubtedly proposed and rejected during those failed meetings.

Google and Verizon jointly posted to each of their corporate blogs, discussing what readers will find in the new proposal. They claim to have been guided by two main goals:

1. Users should choose what content, applications, or devices they use, since openness has been central to the explosive innovation that has made the Internet a transformative medium.
2. America must continue to encourage both investment and innovation to support the underlying broadband infrastructure; it is imperative for our global competitiveness.

A big concern from the general public (that understand these concepts) is about wireless. Google/Verizon argue that wireless broadband is too nascent of a market to impose these standards, and others argue that Google/Verizon is building in a loophole and wireless shouldn't be treated any differently.

At the risk of adding more noise to the debate with my opinions, which may shift as more information comes to light, take some time to review the links at the bottom of this article and the proposal from Google and Verizon that I am embedding here.

Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal

Remember, this is only a proposal. Probably much debate will happen as a result. I just hope the debate is intelligent and open, and not more of the "Google is doing evil" snarkiness that I am primarily seeing now.

Further Reading

Edits include sorting the links by date and adding links after the original posting date of this entry.

• Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal, the official document, Monday, August 9, 2010.



• A joint policy proposal for an open Internet from Google's Public Policy blog, Monday, August 9, 2010.



• Joint Policy Proposal for an Open Internet from Verizon's Technology and Telecommunications Policy blog, Monday, August 9, 2010.



• Google and Verizon's net neutrality proposal explained from Engadget, Monday, August 9, 2010.



• Google-Verizon Pact: It Gets Worse from Huffington Post, Monday, August 9, 2010.



• From Google and Verizon, a path to an open Internet — Op-ed piece in August 10, 2010 (today) Washington Post by Eric Schmidt (Google) and Ivan Seidenberg (Verizon)



• Google and Verizon op-ed: a path to an open Internet, Tuesday, August 10, 2010. Read the comments.



• Demystifying Google and Verizon’s Proposed Policy for the Open Internet from Mashable, Tuesday, August 10, 2010.



• Why is Vint Cerf father of Internet and GOOG VP silent on net neutrality issue? at ZDNet, Tuesday, August 10, 2010.



• Google-Verizon NN pact riddled with gaping loopholes at Ars Technica, Tuesday, August 10, 2010.



• Why Google Became A Carrier-Humping, Net Neutrality Surrender Monkey, from Wired, Tuesday, August 10, 2010.



• A Review of Verizon and Google's Net Neutrality Proposal, from Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Tuesday, August 10, 2010.



• A paper trail of betrayal: Google's net neutrality collapse at Ars Technica, Wednesday, August 11, 2010.



• Comcast wins Web traffic fight against FCC, April 6, 2010 from Reuters



• A Note to Google Users on Net Neutrality from the Google blog in 2006



• Network neutrality (the ideal) from Wikipedia



• Network neutrality in the United States (the real practice and issues) from Wikipedia



• Net Neutrality, or the Lack Thereof, by Ben Henick, August 6, 2010.

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