Web is immature and not growing up. To be clear, I am referring to the mobile Web browsing experience, the Web that will make its natural evolution from being viewed on large desktop screens to one viewed primarily on smaller mobile devices.

When browsing the mobile Web you will find the experience is quite unpleasant since most sites are not optimized for the small screen. If we are going to soon experience a mobile utopia full of simplicity and elegance, things need to drastically change. My hope is just as the immature young person seems to shoot to adulthood quicker than you blink your eye, our mobile experience will transform significantly this year.

The Mobile Web Is Annoying

Mobile computing through smartphones and tablets is growing four times faster than the PC and Internet evolutions of the 1980's and 90's. Even more interesting, people are now using mobile apps more than the "mobile Web" with users spending 94 minutes a day with their mobile apps versus 72 minutes on the Web. Unfortunately, the gap continues to widen each year.

Why is this? I thought browsing the mobile Web was cool?

Through much debate it has been determined the app world offers a better internet experience. According to Forrester Research CEO George Colony:

"The Web is not the internet; it's just a software architecture we decided to put on the internet. Like its software predecessors, the Web will eventually be replaced and we think App Internet is the best direction for the next step. It's faster, simpler and offers a better internet experience."

Here's a video of the entire talk and it's worth a view.

Quite simply, the reasons for using a mobile device are fundamentally different than the reasons why we use a PC. When using a mobile device, consumers are action-oriented and aiming to complete quick tasks such as transactions, communications or searches for information rather than long form reading or document creating such as on a desktop.

Yet, the majority of sites found on the Web today are not optimized for mobile access so the general user experience is terrible. We have to pinch and zoom to read text and to find the appropriate link (which takes two hands by the way... try zooming in and out while carrying something in your other hand), some images don't load well and sites can be too text heavy. And unfortunately, anyone with big thumbs end up hitting the wrong links and take three times longer to complete what should be a quick and easy task.

The terrible mobile browsing experience is precisely why native apps are receiving more and more of our attention. Native apps are designed around and within the small screen, allowing the user a more pleasant experience. I am so not sure the massive growth of the app world is such a good thing and now is not the time to diverge into the native app vs mobile Web debate, but if the mobile Web is to mature there needs to be better standards that put mobile experiences in line with current use cases and patterns. Until then we are left to annoyance and the walled garden of the app world will continue to dominate.

The Mobile Web Is Intriguing

Yet, for all the annoyance there is an intriguing nature to the mobile Web. Strong glimmers of innovative new ideas involving shopping, creating, reading, searching, discovering, communicating, posting, transacting and many other activities are popping up right at our finger tips. It is truly an exciting time as many trends are converging to make 2012 the year the mobile Web finally turns the corner. Here's just a few courtesy of Trendwatching.

One intriguing movement is instant visual information gratification, or bringing information about objects that consumers encounter in the real world through "point and know" actions from their mobile device. The race is on to add a (useful) real world element using textual and visual search, and by "real world" I mean the world of objects and people.

According to trendwatching.com:

"Created by Carnegie Mellon University, PittPatt is a facial recognition tool that enables users to find individuals from photographs or videos. The face detection software can locate human faces and match them up with photographs from Facebook and Google Images, identifying individuals in under 60 seconds."

Another intriguing element of the mobile Web is the cashless society phenomenon. Sure, the cashless consumer concept has been around since the mid-2000's and we've already seen some interesting virtual payment offerings, but nothing major has been driven through the mobile device. Trendwatching.com predicts:

"This year is going to be the year we see major players like Google, MasterCard and others actively roll out their cashless initiatives around the world. For consumers, the initial lure will be convenience, but eventually mobile payments will create an entirely new data-driven eco-system of rewards, purchase history, deals and so on."

Expect to see a lot of innovation on the mobile payments and commerce space going forward.

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