Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Google Blogger enables photo-blogging from phones, so I use it to show what a popular blog service can do in terms of mobile blogging out-of-the-box.

The user sends an e-mail to go@blogger.com to kick it off. The service then automatically creates a blog if it's the first time an e-mail is sent from that user / reply address, and the reply address is used as the identifier from then on. By "claiming" the blog you can configure it the same way as any other blog (change template etc). It's then also easy to reroute the submissions to existing blogs, which is important as the auto-generated blog gets a "funny random" name.

The issue I've seen in Europe is that most people don't have e-mail configured at all, as operators don't use e-mail in their services, and most people don't know how to configure it or even knows it's there.

Often the Blogger scenario doesn't work with MMS either, as there's sent a returning message (with info about the newly created blog) and some (all?) operators don't have a gateway the other way around. Hence, you might get a blog created, but you have no clue where it is, nor how to claim the blog for more advanced configuration. I tested with 3 and it failed due to the above.

It would be convenient for users if there actually was an e-mail-to-MMS gateway, but the issue in at least Europe is of course who should pay for the sent MMS.

E.g. mojungle doesn't have this return message issue, as you first sign up to a web site and you download the script from there after sending the first message. This is not really a blog service either, so you get some and you lose some.

In newer phones I've found that it's easy (at least much easier than before) to take a photo, record video or voice and send that as an MMS or e-mail, so some aspects of phone use have been improved considerably, and there's no real reason for making a Java application for sending audio, photos or videos to blogs and social networks any longer, which is quite beneficial to service providers: no need to tackle the "fragmentation hell" of Java, and simply no need to do anything on the phone side at all. This is of course provided that e-mail or MMS have been configured properly beforehand.

For interactive access to social network services (like MySpace, that includes blog functionality, but also IM, photo/video/audio archive etc), you are more likely to need a Java application. Handling e.g. IM any other way (including via e.g. a browser) doesn't cut it, as you need to see chat log updates and presence in real time.

It all boils down to:
* What's easy to deploy over many handsets?
* What creates the best experience for the end-user?

Blogger: Blogger Mobile