Recently UK mobile operator '3'  launched a mobile portal to promote mobile sites and mobile applications. Ewan takes a look and tells us what he thinks.

3's new software portal, Next (launched last week) is still buzzing around my head as an interesting move. Partly because it takes on board a number of Web 2.0 models that are proving popular on other sites; partly because it’s very pro-active in putting forward a message to every consumer of mobile, not just 3 customers; and partly because I think it’s just a nice idea.

So the Next service is a website accessible from both your desk bound computer (http://next.three.com/) and also on any mobile device (http://3next.mobi/), you register a username and password, and this opens up the full functionality of the site. No matter where you browse, the content is the same, and that content is split into two main sections – software and sites.

 

 

Both of these sections, at the moment are rather empty, and I think this is telling. Firstly because, certainly in terms of mobile sites, 3 must have an extensive knowledge of what people are already browsing from their handsets, and I would think that it wouldn’t be too much effort to cull the top twenty or thirty sites to pre-populate the site – and then the “suggest a site” link would drive the new content.

Unfortunately, at launch there was the sum total of two sites available (the mobile version of Next, and a mobile version of Wikipedia). Naturally, I submitted the All About Symbian mobile site (given the promotion of the XSeries range of phones on 3, which include a number of S60 devices, it seemed a good fit). Unfortunately, coming up for a week later, the only addition to the sites list is that of Twitter.

Software is the second area, and again the number is quite low, with seven titles – hardly a stretch when you consider that Symbian OS has a lot more third party applications than that. Even if you look at just S60 v3 there are easily over 1000 native titles (and many more Java titles), and you have to wonder why there isn’t a larger number pre-populated into the service.

So while the idea of a combined portal to make everything easy to find is a good one, the initial implementation and activity has left me wondering just what 3 are hoping to achieve with this? They received a good amount of coverage with the launch of the site – but to see no action or growth on the site in the first week, when you would expect a lot of people will discover it and ‘kick the tyres’ just seems wrong.

What surprises me most is how much re-invention of the wheel is going on. This is yet another directory that is relying on the fabled 2.0 ‘user generated content’ to populate the database – and there seems to be little incentive to users to start this effort for Three when there are other sites that manage to do similar functions, that are much more active.

I’m hoping that the Next portal will expand and become a great resource, but the Internet is a fast moving target, and to have it sitting still for a week is not a good sign. I’ll continue to watch for signs of life.

 -- Ewan Spence, July 2007