A plea for more seamless integration between Web and mobile services
As a user, I've grown tired of online sites and services either (a) not being available via mobile platforms, (b) having an accompanying but limited wireless component that's therefore not worth using, or (c) not mobile equivalent whatsoever. As a software developer, the lingering complexities in the procedures one takes when developing great counterpart services to existing platforms frustrates me (not isolating any particular developmental platform here - .NET and J2ME each have their idiosyncrasies).
I'm disappointed in the fact that there are so few mobile counterparts to existing web platforms today - and it's certainly not due to not because of a lack of consumer demand, poor device support, lack of relevance with corporate strategy, managerial ignorance, or developer inferiority. Wireless services should be mirrors of their desktop/WWW likenesses (if not standalone ventures), not complementary or subsidiary WAP featurettes that are scaled back to accommodate for device-specific limitations.
I really gravitate towards the mentality of creating extensions of tiered-based services that are inherently device-agnostic and then building clients over a multitude of platforms and for a great variety of disparate systems and devices. SOAP-based web services make this possible, but it still doesn't mean creating the great, rich, functional, scalable, well performing mobile applications into which that data is called is any less of a headache. It's a new philosophy, a new API (relatively speaking), a new set of rules and regulations to learn. And it's too much.
We've made a lot of headway in terms of giving a developer the means to extend the effective reach to an audience by offering data and services over a plethora of platforms and devices (console, WWW, wireless, desktop, set-top boxes, GPS, PDA, etc.). Let's continue this progressive trend by making the means with which we as architects create the conduits to our stuff easier, too.