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According to Mowser’s founder Russell Beattie, the “Mobile Web” is dead. As is his startup Mowser.  I think he’s partially wrong. Russell hasn’t quite figured out how the Internet on mobile devices is likely to work.

Mowser is (was?) an intermediary between a mobile browser and the web. It processed a “regular” web page to display better on a mobile browser (which is the way Opera Mini functions). It made money by inserting its own ads into these rendered pages. Apparently things didn’t work out. There weren’t enough users (and porn made up 80% of traffic), and hardly anyone clicked on the ads.

Which isn’t surprising. Because that isn’t at all how users interact with the web on their mobile devices.

Above all, Intent drives all usage on the mobile phone. Users don’t “browse” or “surf” the Internet on their mobile phones. Rather, they access particular services with a definite intent.  That means that as things stand now, a successful mobile web application would best be a native phone application that pulls data from the Internet but does the rendering locally. For example, a mobile-based Facebook would work best as a native Series 60 application (for Nokia phones) - or a cross-platform Java app.  When a user’s travelling and wants to Facebook a bit, he/she could launch the Facebook application, and it’ll connect to the Internet in the background, pull your mini-feed and other paraphernalia  and display that data on your screen. That way, the application doesn’t need to pull display code (HTML et al) making it faster and the user enjoys a much better experience (including all the AJAX-y effects you want).

The reason a native, single-purpose application will work is because 90% or so of the time, a user wants to interact with only a handful of web applications, but wants a kickass small-screen experience with them. I can imagine shortcuts on my Nokia web-capable phone that say “Gmail” “Facebook”, “Orkut”, “Yahoo Messenger”, “Google Reader”, and “The New York Times”. Which mean “Mail”, “Chat”, “Network”, “News”, “Feeds” (and “Maps”). How many more applications will a user need most of the time? After all, your average user has one email account, one social network, one chat app - you get the drift. (Think how much better the Gmail mobile application works than the web-based m.gmail.com)

Russell is right when he says that applications without a PC equivalent will not work. Take News, for instance. It’s cumbersome to navigate the New York Times on a mobile screen. (Even with iPhone’s pinch-tap-drag-flick wizardry. Admit it. It’s OK.) So I can imagine an NYT mobile application that displays headlines by category and a 5 or 10-line summary for each item (like a partial RSS feed). You can star an item on your phone. When you get to your PC, you click an “Open on Computer” button on your phone application, and Firefox pops up on your computer, opening your starred news items in tabs so you can read them in full. Does that sound better than reading an entire newspaper online on your phone? I can also imagine mobile “portals”, like the Yahoo one Russell pointed out:

Finally, monetization. Of course users won’t click on “interstitial” ads on their Phones. As above, intent is key. And relevance becomes even more important when both bandwidth and screen real estate are at such a premium. The only way someone could monetize ads on a mobile phone is if the ads were relevant to the user’s physical environment. (In a mall? Get ads about offers at stores in that mall. But in the middle of a tiny web page? Not on your life.)

In a follow-up post, I’ll talk about why both Russell and Michael Arrington are mistaken when they latch on to iPhone as the device for the future.