Yahoo! and Google mobile. Now slightly more mobile!

Tags: Business,  Design,  Mobile applications,  Mobile web
January 8, 2008 by Steven

Yahoo! announced a lot of stuff for mobile at CES yesterday. Their new mobilized web page appears to be great. Its fast, easy to read, loads correctly in WAP browsers and one-web browsers (Opera Mini in my case) and even has some sort of device detection so the footer has links to add it to the AT&T browser bookmarks.

Though it works well under some browsers, in Opera Mini all the links are acting as search buttons, even the one to download Go 3.0 beta, so its apparently too beta to actually rely on as yet. Though it looks good, and is easy to read and use, most of the services linked off it (even the search results) seem to be not yet upgraded, so are not that thematically similar, or as cleanly designed, or as usable, as the new home page.



Yahoo Go (us.m.google.com) disappointed me a bit in the previous incarnation (more details in our whitepaper on mobile widgets), so I immediately clicked the link for the 3.0 beta (this is conveniently available from the mobile home page, another nice contextual link, except it also didn't work).

And when they finally got it posted the next day, I installed it. Pretty harrowing. It disregarded my previous (2.0 version) settings, and poor responsiveness plus disabling device input options made it almost impossible to type my password.

Anyway, once we get in, if anything, the interface is even weirder than before. None of the icons have a label at all, until you wait a while for them to fade in. There's a contextual menu below each item. It defaults to "open" but if you scroll up and down, you get options. Unless there aren't any for that item, which is so unclear it could just be the app not responding. And in most cases I can't tell what "Open" means vs. the other options available.

Its reasonably fast to load data, but the overall slow response of the app, and its insistence on not knowing who I am, mean that the effective speed to get anything actually done is very low. It doesn't seem to pre-load anything in the background; you have to select a widget to activate it, so even though the wait is small, there is always a wait.

Its much prettier than before, which make me think that what Yahoo! learned from the iPhone is that pretty is all you need. They missed a lot of usability and usefulness points, sadly. Even widgets like the Flicker one are basically just lists of links. Hardly any data is surfaced to even the second layer.

Still, the biggest thing to watch for is that Yahoo! opened up the platform, so partners can build widgets for it. Not sure what is involved, as its so terribly new, but it makes it more likely that you can find a widget you want, and probably much more likely a carrier would let them put it on the home deck. Hopefully, some of these folks will make good, useful widgets instead of following the existing designs.

A lot of this is to support a Yahoo! play to support their offerings, especially their mobile offerings, with advertising. How this pans out remains to be seen (both from an income and usability/usefulness point of view) but its exciting to see some semblance of a model that puts forth mobile services as a revenue-generating part of a business. For that alone I wish them luck, and will be eagerly watching it. The banners aren't too bad as yet, but I'll bet the first round was heavily influenced by marketing and graphics folks at Yahoo! In a few weeks we'll get a better idea how intrusive these are.



Secondarily — but more immediately relevant to me — when I went to use Google search the other day it suddenly looked like this:

Yup, its mobilized. And seems different than the previous mobile version in some way. I thought it used to have more junk around than just the simple list below the search.

Of course, with no press release or anything, its hard to tell what changes happened for or if its even on purpose. Maybe its a bug, or a bugfix. Or maybe they just read our blog and do whatever I say.

This also proves my point about mobilized web being better on mobile devices; it was so fast to load I wasn't even expecting it. So fast that I now can use google to find things when out and about (or just too lazy to pick up my heavy, heavy laptop) at a speed that makes sense.


«« one web? Not to most mobile subscribers  |  ubiquitous mobile internet in five years? Why wait? »»

4 Comments »

  1. I can’t get the same google page you pictured …
    What url did you use ? google.com ? I get the classical google mobile page (with the radio buttons ‘web’, ‘images’, etc.)

    Comment by C?dric — January 9, 2008 @ 8:02 am

  2. google.com/ forwards (instantly) to google.com/m. May indeed be a bug, transient condition or a change to something AT&T did instead. Though I see no other sites differently. Hmmm….

    Comment by steven — January 9, 2008 @ 9:32 am

  3. The Yahoo! Go is becoming so weird… haha… I wonder how people are reacting to those menus.

    Comment by Alexis Brion — January 13, 2008 @ 4:13 am

  4. hai

    Comment by joe — January 29, 2008 @ 8:30 am

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