How important is mobile support to you?

Very important (31)

66%

Nice to have (13)

28%

Not important (3)

6%

Please share your thoughts

My site's demographic wouldn't use it... Not too important for me.

The last 2 yaers of 5 my site exists I have a lot of question from users why they can not register or browse some content at my site on their smart phones.

For me I guess it will give at least 20% of visits additionally

I would like it for forums.

It's the future

Hi Will,

For the majority of sites of a social networking nature, mobile is/will be a must have - especially the ability to view/comment/post journal items. My thoughts on possible approaches have included:

1) Social Summary and Journal View pages that are mobile browser friendly (AS custom view?)
2) RSS capabilities would be useful to push data out to mobile devices
3) A certified generic iPhone and Andriod based AS application that can be used (via configuration) to connect to an AS enabled website.

Thanks,
Dave

Well, the goal of social network sites is to give users what they want, that is the only way to grow.  Mobile access is growing rapidly, I know my wife and I use it - though I can surf a site with no mobile app nearly just as well.  Clearly, a mobile app is important.  So the question is how important, compared to all other issues.  IMO a website/software should be rock solid before considering the mobile app.  If it is not, it is unlikely to attract a high volume of visitors, and if there are few visitors, the benefits of the mobile app are limited or in most cases, essentially non-existent.  A mobile app will not increase traffic significantly, it simply helps winners stay winners.  Of course there are exceptions, like if you had a low traffic financial website but wanted to allow account access via mobile, but that would be a custom job.

So in my opinion, making a product that is in all ways, and I do mean all ways, superior or at least on par with the best in class, is far more important than constantly adding to the product.  From a developer perspective, it is much more psychologically rewarding to continuously add features, rather than address every little issue/deficiency.  But the sum of the small issues/deficiencies is glaring in the face of the end users.

You don't necessarily need to have a mobile app to provide mobile support.

timely article that provides some ComScore stats on mobile access to social networking sites:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20...ag=nl.e703

Posted By Will Morgenweck on 03 Jun 2010 12:55 PM
You don't necessarily need to have a mobile app to provide mobile support.

I absolutely agree. In fact, I wouldn't consider any platform-specific app (iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, etc.) to be mobile support, but only a specific flavor of mobile support. I think it's much more important to enable mobile support in the core web-based software and allow administrators to choose if, how, and to what extent they wish to support mobile browsers.

I voted that mobile support is "Very Important" but that's qualified with what my view of mobile support its - and it's not a separate app.

This is an excellent summary of our mobile strategy.

Very important for Signup, Messages, member list & search, profile & group journal & forums.... That's just about entire kit isn't it...

Will: I think you are on the right track!

This is very important for us; though I do agree with Jason in that exisiting features should be "best of class:' and provide customers and the end-user withgreat satisfaction.

I come from a world-of Win32 client DB app development with Delphi (primarily). Moving to the Web/DNN/AS world, I have been amazed with the poor quality/usability of tools/modules etc. Continuous improvement of existing features, functionality and usability must have high priority. I know that you have to balance updates, new features and new product cycles to stay in business and prosper. High quality has to be the glue that binds everything. Effective and detailed documentation is costly to produce, but pays dividends in reduced support and user satisfaction.

Thanks for continuing to ask us what we need and what is important.

I think the question is not going to be if it is important, the question is what do you provide for mobile support. With 3G and 4G networks becoming prevalent, more and more of this type of activity is happening on mobile devices. Of course, while the iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile are normally what you think of for the mobile device space, so is the iPad or a notebook. So you are really talking about small form factor devices. Unless you are truly talking about apps (iPhone, iPad, iTouch, etc)

You already provide significant GUI customization and that is a large part of mobile web browser based support. One area for consideration may be the base pages where users are directed. For instance, if there is only one "Group View" default page, that may be problematic for a portal that has a separate set of pages for mobile support.

I am still in search of an elegant solution for detection, transformation and/or redirection based on mobile devices. I know their are some options available, I just don't have a lot of confidence in them. But those are outside of the scope of AS.

The other opportunity will be true mobile apps. I understand your reluctance to go there, but at some point you or (some adventurous 3rd party) might look at the Web Services path for some of the data surrounding AS and AF. Of course then someone needs to build a template app for various devices to consume it, and customize distinct apps for each portal. OK, maybe I just went past the tolerance of the DNN community.

I think that there IS an opportunity for true mobile apps. In terms of exposing the data and building the app, it will probably just be each man for himself. But it would be so much easier for me to have an app to even respond to this message than to get an email, then surf to the site, drill in, etc, and finally get to respond. But, I would not want to have a generic Active Social application to do those things either.

So again, I think it is really about what makes sense for AS and AF to do in the mobile space, not should you do something.

Raymond, these are actually very easy to write. I've built two for clients (one as a DNN module) with very little effort.



I agree completely. Giving the admin control is the ultimate concept. In our case we would need to expose far more than AS content to mobile users. That said - as the webkit browsers continue to support more "web" access to the device feature sets (geo, pictures, phone, etc) and the 3/4G networks continue to make "always on" mobile a reality for even the most remote areas I think a web app is a great first step.

This approach is especially important to most DNN operators as they don't tend to be large enterprises...meaning their ability to create, support and upgrade device specific apps is a significant business limiter. By focusing on web mobile through template engines this make mobile features a reality for small but crafty operators. For those with more ambition and time/money/market a hybrid app that leverages the template model is perfect.

As long as the template concepts remain then individual admins and website operators can easily wrapper the functionality exposed in AS and others (Ventrian recently added [ISMOBILE] tokens to Property Agent for example) using PhoneGap or similar.

Lastly, I think this concept reinforces the idea that the core modules will continue to improve in quality and feature set and stability. After all...we're talking about a slightly different UI presentation of the core module rather than a new app to support.

Personally, I'm very excited about this concept. My users ask me all the time for mobile features and I see it as a key competitive advantage for our site.

What I do when I'm waiting for the train, the dentist to be ready or the plane to be called is browsing news in the net. Obviously this is a pain the rear when it comes to most dnn sites. Being an iPhone user this isn't all too bad, yet there is room for improvment. But, as someone said already, it's down to the site admin to provide that kind of support. Modules like AF give you the possibilities at hand with their templating system. Having mobile support in the module is not so important, I guess. It#s rather the whole site that has to support it.

It doesn't really help if, let's say AF would have a built-in mobile template. If the skin around the forums do not reflect the visitors client there isn't won anything. If I would want or need to support mobile clients I'd set up a module on my forum page that redirects the visitor to a special page with a special skin and an instance of the forum that use another template.

What would help there when it comes to AF (and that no only holds true for mobile visitors) would be if the "every" aspect in the module is templated (e.g. toolbar, stats, breadcrumbs)

I already voted in favor of this!! For quite some time I have this on my agenda and also for quite some time I have the following module on my wish list:

http://www.snowcovered.com/Snowcove...geID=14490

Is anyone of you familliar with this module? If so, what are your experiences?

Thanks in advance.

Yes, I use MobiNuke for over 2 years for my mobile app (www.pokerdiy.com/mob.aspx) and helped the module developer refine it... then he suddenly released a new version that did not support module actions (ie. backwards breaking compatability) - rendering my complete solution redundant. I appealed but he was adamant, so I ripped it out. You can see my public review on Snow about this (he eventually refunded me but the module is useless to me and cost me days and days of time).

Bad feelings aside, I have found it is MUCH easier implementing it as a normal page like I have done in the link above - the concept behind MobiNuke was very good but without active development it is not worth pursuing, and it is way too immature in it's current state - the core will eventually help out on the mobile front - I don't think you need to use a httphandler solution for this.

Thanks for your thoughts Rodney.

I used this article as a basis for a simple mobile redirect module on DNN.

http://www.experts-exchange.com/art...ction.html

To us mobile technology / capability is extremely important. We use AS for our core social system (www.moanspace.com) and find that most events, where users want to make posts, are when they are out and just experienced something they want to moan about! Both Twitter and Facebook have iPhone Apps which makes the process of updating quick and efficient meaning that users remain interactive and loyal. That's what we want too...