Category Archives: Mobile

Mobile Site Owners Should Abandon Password Masking

In his latest “Alertbox”, Jakob Nielsen recommends that websites stops masking passwords as users type them. He outlines the drawbacks of password masking and explains that this causes login problems and lost business:

* Users make more errors when they can’t see what they’re typing while filling in a form. They therefore feel less confident. This double degradation of the user experience means that people are more likely to give up and never log in to your site at all, leading to lost business. (Or, in the case of intranets, increased support calls.)
* The more uncertain users feel about typing passwords, the more likely they are to (a) employ overly simple passwords and/or (b) copy-paste passwords from a file on their computer. Both behaviors lead to a true loss of security.

He also explains that password masking was “a particularly nasty usability problem” on mobile devices.

Dennis Bournique raised that issue last year and also felt that password masking was not necessary on mobile sites.

Indeed, with such a small device on your hand and a tiny screen, who is going to see what you are typing? If you’re using password protected sites on your phone, I’m sure you often do many attempts before typing your password correctly (I know I do with Bloglines or Gmail).

Nielsen recommends abondonning this feature on web sites, and also on mobile sites. Personnaly, I’m not sure this is good idea for desktop web sites, Nielsen forgot to mention that you often log in to a web site while many people can look at your screen (think open-space offices, internet cafés, etc).

But for mobile websites, this makes perfect sense and will provide a more enjoyable experience.

Health care is high-priced, that’s why certain patients cannot order the medicines they need. Currently more than quoter of men aged 40 to 70 reported some degree of erectile difficulties. Of course most popular is Viagra. What about sexual dysfunctions and “questo link“? What is the most momentous information you have to study about “”? The very significant point you need look for is “”. A scientific research found that just 14 percent of patients taking Wellbutrin told about sexual dysfunction. If you get any prescription drugs like Viagra, check with a physician that they are healthy to take with your other remedies. Do not give Viagra or any medicament to anyone under 18 years old without medical advice.

Brin: Google Chrome will be part of Android

Google Chrome launched yesterday, and it’s for PCs only, but I’ve heard many people (online and colleagues) who were wondering if Google’s browser will be part of Android.

Well, according to Sergey Brin, it will. Google has so many ambitions in the mobile space that they’d love to have people using their browser from their mobiles, to better understand user habits.

At the Chrome launch event Tuesday, CNet reports that Brin said “”Probably a subsequent version of Android is going to pick up a lot of the Chrome stack”.

Chrome has been created to run Javascript faster, while most mobile phones currently don’t support it, they will in the next few years, so Google is ready to stay ahead of its competitors in the mobile browser landscape.

Mobile Web: Bango Offers a Way to Track Unique Visitors

Since I started doing Mobile SEO about 2 years ago, the main problem that I’ve encountered in my duties was that there’s no way to identify unique visitors when it comes to mobile surfing.

Indeed, as opposed to the desktop Web, where cookies or IP addresses (sometimes combined with user agents for better accuracy) are used to identify unique visitors, it’s another story with the mobile Web. Cookies aren’t supported by all phones and IP addresses aren’t unique to each end user, but it’s the one belonging to the WAP gateway used when you surf from your cell phone.

Today, Bango, a leading provider of mobile billing solutions and also of a mobile analytics suite announced today that it is the first company to provide an accurate unique visitor count.

This may sound surprising, but here’s how Bango explains how it works:

For each individual that clicks on an ad or browses a site, a privacy protected Bango User ID is created, compiled through sophisticated WAP gateway profiling, data from browser analysis, session information and network interactions. This unique user ID enables Bango to distinguish between new and repeat users and therefore quantify precisely the number of unique visitors.

Bango is close to many mobile phone carriers so it managed to work something out with them to profile users. But one thing that I’m not sure of is if this feature works with any carrier…I’ll ask this to Bango when I get a chance.

You can try Bango Analytics here.

Firefox Mobile

Below is a concept video of Firefox Mobile, currently being developed by Mozilla Labs. You really need to watch it, note that the final version may not look like what is presented here but it does explains the directions Mozilla is thinking in : touch screen interface, large screen, hidden controls while browsing, and more.


Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Health care is high-priced, that’s why certain patients cannot order the medicines they need. Currently more than quoter of men aged 40 to 70 reported some degree of erectile difficulties. Of course most popular is Viagra. What about sexual dysfunctions and “questo link“? What is the most momentous information you have to study about “”? The very significant point you need look for is “”. A scientific research found that just 14 percent of patients taking Wellbutrin told about sexual dysfunction. If you get any prescription drugs like Viagra, check with a physician that they are healthy to take with your other remedies. Do not give Viagra or any medicament to anyone under 18 years old without medical advice.

Opera Mini Report: WAP is Dead Again, Social Networks Dominate Traffic

Opera published some very interesting data yesterday regarding Opera Mini users’ habits. They looked at aggregate and anonymous traffic of more than 44 million cumulative Opera Mini users worldwide.

Key findings of the report are that:

– Opera Mini users go mainly to social networking sites, it accounts for almost 41% of traffic. Those sites are either desktop websites that people want to access from their phones (ie. Facebook), or sites specifically designed for use on a mobile phone. (ie. MocoSpace).

– More than 11.9 million people used Opera Mini in March to browse 2.4 billion pages. Thus far, more than 44 million cumulative users have tried Opera Mini.

– “One Web will triumph over WAP content:” translate: “WAP is dead”: Opera reports that “full” web surfing comprises more than 77% of all traffic, and traffic to WAP sites has declined. Well, that’s no surprise, Opera Mini users are aware that they can browse desktop websites from their phone so they prefer to do so, but remember that there are 3 billion mobile phones worldwide, and a large part of them access more to mobile sites than full websites, since they mostly use the native WAP browser pre-installed on their phone.

So unless every mobile user downloads Opera Mini or buy a high end phone, WAP (WML) and mobile sites will still be used in majority.

– Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.

Also included in the report is a snapshot of the top 10 countries for Opera Mini ranked by usage, you can see that most of the top countries are not the richest ones, which again proves that developing countries represent a major opportunity in terms of mobile services.

Snapshot: China

  • Web portal content and search engine access is extremely popular in China, accounting for nearly 55% of the traffic.
  • E-commerce and e-mail are not yet as popular in China as in other parts of the world. Together, these two categories combine to create less than 2% of overall Opera Mini traffic in China.

Top 10 sites in China

China
  1. www.sina.com
  2. www.baidu.com
  3. www.google.cn
  4. www.ko.cn
  5. news.sohu.com
  6. www.xiaonei.com
  7. www.3g.cn
  8. www.paojiao.com
  9. www.188bet.com
  10. www.feiku.com

Snapshot: United States

  • More than 63% of U.S. Web traffic on mobile phones is to social networks, tying it with Indonesia for the number one spot.

Top 10 sites in the U.S.

United States
  1. www.myspace.com
  2. www.google.com
  3. www.mocospace.com
  4. www.yahoo.com
  5. www.facebook.com
  6. www.live.com
  7. www.hi5.com
  8. www.wikipedia.org
  9. www.itsmy.com
  10. www.ebay.com

Snapshot: United Kingdom

  • The United Kingdom is the world leader in mobile e-mail, although that number remains small. More than 11% of traffic in Q1 was to Web-based e-mail services.

Top 10 sites in the U.K.

United Kingdom
  1. www.facebook.com
  2. www.google.co.uk
  3. www.live.com
  4. www.bebo.com
  5. www.mocospace.com
  6. news.bbc.co.uk
  7. uk.yahoo.com
  8. www.itsmy.com
  9. www.faceparty.com
  10. www.ebay.co.uk

Opera Mini: The Cheaters’ Choice?

Today, Opera announced the public availability of the latest version of Opera Mini (4.1). See the press release here.

The press release explains the new features available and cites Opera’s CEO saying that more than 44 million people have downloaded Opera Mini so far.

There’s also a citation from one user which is rather funny. It’s from a student from Lithuania:

“Opera Mini 4.1 is just great,” says RamÅ«nas Monkevičius, a student from Lithuania. “I use it at school to find information on Wikipedia, […]it really helps me at school. I can just save my Wikipedia pages and access them whenever I need to. My history grades improved drastically, thanks to Opera Mini.”

Did the guy just say that Opera Mini was an innovative technique for cheating at school? O_o I believe so 🙂

AdMob Launches Free Mobile Analytics Solution

AdMob, one of the largest mobile advertising networks, has recently announced the launch of AdMob Analytics, a free mobile web analytics solution.

According to the press release, the main features will be:

“The AdMob Analytics suite allows mobile site owners to track site performance metrics such as unique visitors, duration of visit, page performance, as well as user details including geography, operator and device specifics”

” AdMob Mobile Analytics will also provide site owners visibility into their sources of traffic including search engines, direct traffic and advertising. Combined with the ability to track conversion of the specific events and actions that the campaign seeks to drive, this enables measurement of campaign performance”

I wonder what is AdMob’s definition of “unique visitor”. Unlike on the desktop Internet ecosystem, the mobile Internet doesn’t allow the use of cookies or Javascript on all mobile devices. To my knowledge, the only reliable way to identify unique visitors is by using it’s MSISDN, which is only retrievable by carriers or mobile billing companies such as Bango (which are linked to carriers).

AdMob Analytics is not open to the public yet, you need to request an invite for their beta version on the site.

I cannot say much about the service since I haven’t tested it yet and they aren’t many information on the site. But that’s good to see someone launching a free mobile analytics solution, this will help marketers and mobile site owners get useful information about their visitors, and tune their sites to improve user experiences.

ACID Test-like for Mobile Web Browsers

The “Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group“, a W3C group whose goal is to provide test suites for mobile Web technologies just recently announced the launch of its “Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers”.

In the same spirit as the well known ACID tests for desktop Web browsers, the Web Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers (no, they couldn’t find a better name :)) allows to test 12 Web technologies “ranging from well-deployed (but often poorly implemented on mobile devices) technologies such as HTTPS and PNG, to technologies we believe will matter in a year or two (like SVG animation and CSS Media Queries).”

To perform the test, you need to point your mobile web browser to this URI: http://dev.w3.org/2008/mobile-test/test.html or this one (shorter): http://tinyurl.com/37e33p

Each technology is represented by a square, if the technology is supported, the square will be green.

Opera mini 4.1 test

Test of Opera Mini 4.1

As more and more people go online from their mobile devices, this test will help decide if the browsers installed on their phones can provide them with the most enjoyable experience.

That’s really a nice move from the W3C. More information here .