It’s been long known that on mobile, users prefer “bite-sized” content – easy to consume/produce, disposable, cheap.

This is a fundamental issue with the “app” approach – users get bored and move on to the next new thing. In the meantime, websites consistently receive mobile traffic from search, Twitter and links in emails.

As a publisher or an advertiser, which route would you take?

Recent mobile advertising stats from AdMob confirm a clear trend – the number and quality of Android devices are growing at an amazing pace. HTC, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung and even Google itself are releasing and promoting Android-equipped mobiles all around the world. Ad impressions served to Android devices almost doubled from October to December 2009, quickly catching up with the iPhone. Here at Mobify, we’ve been playing with HTC Hero and Nexus One – both are great products ready for mainstream users.

What does it mean for you and your business? Good things and good things only.

If you’re a part of the Web community, it’s a good idea to start focusing on WebKit as the new baseline for mobile web experiences (if you’re building a growth business). While legacy browsers from Nokia & RIM are still popular outside of North America, in two years from now that won’t be the case. At the same time, be conscious that fragmentation will still be a part of the new mobile web – Android devices come in all shapes and sizes.

Mobile developers are celebrating the growth of a new distribution channel that’s open by design. Today, Android Market is not yet as mature as AppStore – but it’s only a matter of time. More cross-platform native development frameworks will make creating games even easier. Entering overseas markets will still require localization, but at the very least the distribution channel will stay familiar.

Finally, for those of our readers with brick-and-mortar businesses – features long promised by the mobile industry are finally becoming real. Location, fast mobile web browsing, email and integration with proven online platforms are quickly becoming a commodity – something your customers are very likely to use. There will be amazing business opportunities to take advantage of and Mobify will be there to help!

As the mobile web breaks growth record after growth record, let’s step back for a second and think about what happens next. Today’s web surfing experience, characterized by a mix of desktop & mobile-friendly websites, will make way for something better. What will the mobile web feel like in 2014, five years from now?

Going from website to website will feel like switching from one iPhone app to another. It is still relatively rare to see a mobile website, but more are launched every day. One of our favourite past-times at Mobify is discovering “mobile web chains” – starting with a mobile-friendly website and clicking offsite links to other mobile-friendly sites. A four or five node mobile web chain is already common (eventually it is interrupted by a desktop-only site). With big publishers, content sites and popular CMS distributions all going mobile, the “pinch & zoom” experience will soon feel as ancient as “Best viewed in Internet Explorer” banners.

Location-aware search will include vast quantities of real-time data from retailers, web platforms and government agencies, becoming a key mobile web use case. Watching my sister spend 30 minutes looking for the right shoe size in four different retail outlets made it clear that local search is a big problem waiting to be solved. Retailers have a fairly up-to-date knowledge of what’s in stock – it will inevitably make its way to buyers through popular search engines, together with many other streams (the Twitter-Google deal is only the beginning). Meeting up with friends and family (and looking for the right Christmas presents for them) will start with a mobile search bar.

With desktops, mobiles, netbooks and tablets all heading to the same Web destinations, ads will learn to position themselves accordingly. Recent Android devices like the Nexus One and Motorola Droid have increased pixel density (480×854) which is not addressed by the guidelines of the mobile advertising industry. If a bigger mobile ad size is introduced, it will start overlapping with desktop ad standards maintained by the IAB. In a world where any kind of device can navigate to any webpage, more and more advertising decisions will be made client-side, enriched by sensor information. Display ads will adapt depending on the user’s viewport, instead of being placed statically around a webpage.

What do you think the mobile web will evolve into?

1. The “i-mode” mobile web experience looks and feels outdated. It is terrifying how similar most i-mode pages are to sites rendered on a Motorola RAZR, perhaps because the browsers are supplied by the same vendors. Yes, there is lots of content in i-mode and its competitors that millions of people use, but it’s far from a well-designed mobile view or a mobile app in terms of the overall experience. Flash Lite, which is Japan’s way to develop rich mobile interfaces is mostly used for creating landing pages only, handing off links to the browser. In the end, to get a modern browser on a device, a good OS is necessary – LiMo and Symbian, current market leaders in Japan, are already behind in their arms race with Android.

2. Japanese carriers want to control everything, including the OS of their devices. Historically carriers like NTT DoCoMo would order devices directly from manufacturers, specifying everything down to the color. This kind of influence is not possible with Apple – in fact, we’ve heard horror stories about the effort that SoftBank (the Japanese carrier for the iPhone) had to go through to get emoji, a core mobile feature in Japan, included in the 2.2 firmware. Android is the opposite – the carriers can customize it any way they like. That’s why DoCoMo brass proudly carry around the recent white HTC Android device (though often have a feature phone as well).

3. The developer community is increasingly looking at the global market, instead of focusing on Japan alone. We met several iPhone & Android app developers who dream big – their applications are not quite as smooth as the best ones coming out of SV, but quickly getting there. Many in the japanese mobile community are frustrated with the slowing pace of local innovation, especially when it comes to mobile software. Just like developers in the West, they want openness, power and a big international audience – all of which are promised by Android.

The degree to which Android will take off in Japan will also depend on the smartphone/feature phone balance. Not everybody needs the advanced features of a WebKit-equipped mobile, but the economies of scale should eventually make it economical to use Android for all types of devices. A world-class, free mobile OS, combined with outstanding hardware could propel the japanese mobile ecosystem to even greater heights. Google’s renewed focus on the market is no coincidence.

It was great to visit Japan, huge thanks to everyone who helped make the trip happen and supported us on the ground.

We’ve got three goals for it and we need your help to achieve all of them:

1) Create world’s leading resource for best practices, guides and tools related to mobile web design. If you’re wondering about designing websites for the Motorola Droid, or need to know if Blackberry Storm supports float elements, the Community is the place to go to. The ever-expanding Guides section should answer most of your Mobify-related questions. We’ll also work hard to get service vendors like DeviceAnywhere and PerfectoMobile to provide discounts and special offers to all of our members.

2) Connect site owners and mobile web designers in an effective mobile marketplace. Mobify is built to let web designers create amazing mobile experiences. This also means that some of our users prefer having a professional develop their mobile presence (and they’re willing to pay for it!). Visit the Job Board if you’re a web designer looking for new projects or a site owner looking to hire.

3) Have fun and get to know each other : ). Since Mobify launched, we’ve exchanged thousands of emails with fantastic people all around the world. Let’s get together to create the beautiful, effective and fast mobile web of tomorrow.

The Mobify Community is still young – please, come on in and introduce yourself!

Mobify: What made you start designing for mobile?

Aaron: Having developed web apps in Silicon Valley for years, I was ready to start my own agency and build a team of designers and engineers. The question was what business focus would have potential for growth in the coming years, as well as making an important contribution to small and mid-sized businesses (a sector I personally enjoy working with).

One day while quietly sitting and mulling it over, it somehow popped into my head that helping businesses reach their best prospects and clients through mobile handhelds met all the criteria. After a few weeks of market research, I was convinced.

There is an even bigger motivation, which wasn’t obvious to me at the beginning. You see, the mobile internet isn’t just another shiny new technology. This shift to making the web truly mobile – which is happening right now, and will take several years to play out – is, in my opinion, going to prove historically significant. It is truly a new mass media, whose reach and power is likely to exceed radio, TV, perhaps even the desktop-oriented Internet.

I believe its emergence will go down in history books as one of humanity’s milestones, nearly up there with the emergence of the Internet itself. Who WOULDN’T want to be involved in that?

(And by the way, if you’re a web designer who wants to get paid to use Mobify to help build the mobile web, send a message to jobs@hilomath.com now

Mobify: What kind of response do you get from your clients?

Aaron: Most clients so far are not-quite-small businesses, whose operators initially have not necessarily thought much about what their website looks like on phones. So, there is an education element in prospecting, which is why I’ve been doing things like giving talks to business groups. When first introducing the idea in person, it’s a joy to watch their eyes light up in their “oh, wow!” moment.

Once the job is done – the client has paid, and has received their mobile website – they’re generally thrilled. It’s been easy for us to collect testimonials from them, they are so happy with it.

Despite the “oh wow” reaction, it’s still a hard sell sometimes, because having a mobile-optimized web presence is still perceived as an optional expense. And sometimes it honestly is. Certain organizations will benefit from their mobile-optimized website much more than others (restaurants and cafes come to mind).

This will change in the coming years as mobile internet use grows. Just wait until it’s normal for a company’s web site to get over 50% of its traffic from handhelds. No one in their right mind will ignore that.

Mobify: What’s your favorite feature of Mobify?

Aaron: This one’s a no brainer! It’s Mobify’s painless device detection and – related to that – content adaptation.

Unless they’ve hand-rolled a few mobile sites, I think most designers don’t appreciate the tremendous engineering challenge involved in having the web server quickly decide what kind of device the visitor is using, and dispatching appropriate content.

WURFL, the handheld device database, had almost 12,000 distinct device listings in September 2009. Doing the classification accurately, and without adding hundreds or thousands of milliseconds to response time, is hard enough. And then, new devices come out every week. Oh, and be careful what you do with search engine bots, or you’ll make a mess of your SEO!

There are free and paid libraries that make all this easier, but it’s great that Mobify just handles it all for you. Not all of our clients are appropriate for Mobify, but many are, and its conveniences allow us to price our services much lower in those cases.

Mobify: How do you see the web design process evolve over the next few years, with mobile devices and netbooks gaining market share?

Aaron: I think people will start to recognize that mobile-based web browsing is fundamentally different. Not because of the physical constraints of the devices – screen size, power, et cetera – though that is obviously a factor. The biggest difference is the context. When you’re out in the world, maybe with friends or traveling somewhere, your mindset and needs are different from when you are sitting at your office desk, or relaxing at home on the couch with a notebook in your lap.

As a result, we’re going to have to come up with information architecture patterns that simultaneously support desktop and mobile views. Do you serve the same content, including the same page structure, just with different CSS styling (which we’ve done with some clients)? Or do you have wholly different web sites for desktop and mobile (which we’ve also done)? A wealth of choices lie in between. And as has been repeated over and over in the web’s brief history, whenever great new technology shifts happen, it will become obvious what works best through collective experience over time.

By the way, about netbooks: people sometimes equate netbooks and handhelds. That makes no sense to me. Nearly all netbooks are much closer to a typical laptop than to a smartphone, in the ways that matter. Not just in physical size and interface. But more importantly, in how people use them.

Mobify: What’s an area where you think the mobile web has great potential?

Aaron: A big frontier is mobile marketing (MM). There are already people out there presenting themselves as MM experts, and many of them are truly offering advice and services of value. That said, I think there is tremendous untapped potential, and people are still figuring out how to take full advantage of it.

Consider email marketing, which has been practical and technologically simple for well over a decade. But only now are turnkey services like AWeber, Constant Contact, and Vertical Response becoming mainstream. Such applications are obvious in hindsight. Makes you wonder, what game-changing mobile web marketing opportunities are hiding in front of our noses right now?

Mobify: Any closing thoughts?

Aaron: Just thank you Mobify for being here, and making my life a lot easier!

And if any web designers are reading this and would like to be paid to use Mobify, send us a note at jobs@hilomath.com.