Try My Survey. Will That Be WAP Or WHML?
Surveys work best when they sample the widest population. That is surely achieved when a survey is done on the Mobile Web. Sending a survey by direct mail or stopping passers-by in a shopping mall can produce a very biased sample. Cell phones are likely to get to a much bigger audience.
Now Matt Hickey points out that Wirenode has brought out Mobiode, a survey tool for mobile phones. Here’s how it works:
Using the built-in WAP or WHML browsers on today?s handsets, site operators can ask user?s opinions on any range of topics, and get the results fast. In theory, it?s not much different than Web surveys that have been around for more than a decade, but in practice, it?s really cool.
By adding a ?sniffer? that determines which phone a person accessing the survey is using, the server can feed pages to the user that are optimized for their phone?s particular browser, in WAP, HTML, WHML, or whatever else will be the fastest and most reliable method. This means that one of the biggest hurdles of mobile Web browsing, compatibility, is no longer in the equation.
This approach is very much in line with the thoughts of Eli Dickinson. In a post entitled ‘Mobile Web revisited‘, he wrote:
The idea of a device-independent “One Web” is an excellent, worthy goal, but in some ways I do believe it is Utopian (and GAP author Luca Passani and I aren’t the only ones who think so).
Indeed Luca Passani has also written a Switcher program, which is ideal for .mobi domains. It redirects the visitor to the appropriate URI for the device being used. That’s a way of following the Alternation approach, which is one of the Basic Concepts here.
Tags: Mobile, alternation
Go To Top
BPWrap
