I got an email from a fellow named Shawn McCollum asking me to take a look at his new mobile site, Wampad.com<\/a><\/em>. I believe that Shawn has actually created a new type of mobile site – a search based portal. The basic concept is that you enter a search phrase once and then use it to query a bunch of different sites.<\/p>\n
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That’s a lot of choices, perhaps too many, but you can customize Wampad to remove any of the search types that you don’t use and change the order in which they appear.<\/p>\n
Wampad provides a consistent interface to many different sites. It also speeds searching by allowing you to use the same query string against multiple sites without having to retype it. This is a real help as most phones (except smartphones) don’t offer copy and paste. Even Opera Mini, as great as it is, doesn’t support cut and paste. Mobile web users tend to avoid entering text and in fact the W3C’s
\nMobile Web Best Practices 1.0 document urges mobile developers to minimize text entry<\/a>. Yet for tasks involving searching, a text query is generally the most efficient and often the only practical way to perform the search – think getting the definition of a word, tracking a flight or bringing up a MySpace user’s page. Wampad lets users reuse what they have already entered, saving effort. It’s not un-common to search for the same word across multiple search engines, the encyclopedia and the dictionary. Users tend to use the same user name on multiple social sites like Flickr, MySpace, a personal bog on MSN Spaces etc. so there’s reusability there too. You’d use the same zip code to get weather, movie show times or local news. Ideally, I’d like to see Wampad remember my last ten or so search strings and let me choose them from a list like auto-complete in web browsers. Maybe I’m making too much of the value of reusing previous text entry, but I think it’s small things like this that make mobile applications attractive to users.
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\nWhile I think Wampad has created a useful new UI paradigm for mobile browsing, the site itself is still a little rough around the edges, understandable for a new site. Here are a few things that I think would make Wampad even better.<\/p>\n
Shawn has his own plans for Wampad enhancements. Wampad has a full-sized web site<\/a> which currently displays the Wampad mobile site running in a mobile emulator. Shawn feels that showing mobile content on the desktop helps to drive increased mobile usage. I agree that many people think that reading the news or a map on a “tiny” cell phone screen is impractical, but when they actually see it done either on a real phone or even simulated on a web page they change their mind. Toward that end, Shawn’s thinking of creating a Wampad sidebar. He’s done a mock up<\/a> of how it will look in Vista. Other plans for the web site include free user accounts which will allow registered users to more extensively customize Wampad. Users would also get a profile page where they could set up links to mobile versions of their Flickr, MySpace, Del.icio.us, etc. pages and then share their Wampad profile pages with their friends as a kind of mobile homepage. An enhanced local search is also planned where entering a zip code would return multiple types of local information from various sources. Shawn sees building a community of users as a key to the success of the site and said that while he’d like to add popular features like photo-sharing and moblogs, that as only one guy working on Wampad in his spare time he’s better off concentrating on features that aren’t found on existing mobile sites.<\/p>\n
Wampad: xhtml-mp<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I got an email from a fellow named Shawn McCollum asking me to take a look at his new mobile site, Wampad.com. I believe that Shawn has actually created a new type of mobile site – a search based portal. The basic concept is that you enter a search phrase once and then use it to query a bunch of different sites. Wampad’s front page is simplicity itself. There’s just a drop down, a text box and a Go button. … Continue reading