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[Updated - January 2019]
I started jampaw.com in 2006, as a personal endeavor -- I needed a directory to mobile-useful and mobile-usable Web sites that worked on my relatively simple mobile phone. I invested limited weekend time, outside of my job as CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium, building a simple directory of sites that I found useful and usable on a simple mobile , pre-smart, phone. I add new sites as I discover them and when I have time.
The most important metric was:
- Fewest keystrokes and shortest wait to get to the most
useful Web sites. People my age will remember entering letters
on a numeric phone pad, when you would have to hit the "2" key
3 times to get the letter "C". Even "jampaw" can be typed with
just one hit per letter ;-)
Accordingly, I erred here toward small pages (except this one) and the use of access keys, instead of larger pages with more content that requires a lot of scrolling.
The later arrival of the iPhone, Androids, and smarter-phones
made all of this unnecessary. OUr work at W3C helped drive the mobile
Web.
Some things I had planned to do include:
- location-based emphasis (input city, postal code, etc., then bias director and queries toward this area)
- a Web-site ranking scheme that, in addition to location, combines measures of mobile-OK-ness, with measures of mobile-usefulness (popularity, user-suggestions, linked-to, etc.), and that can be tuned by users.
- an ability for users to easily customize their top-level myJamPaw pages (see mine) so they can “speed surf” (using access keys) to the categories and Web sites of greatest importance to them, or select different styles (see "cool" example).
- semantic Web technologies to manage content and user-specific data in a flexible and extensible manner.
- tools to enable a global community to work together to bring the mobile Web to people in the developing world.
- (if this were a commercial site) a mobile advertising scheme that makes it easy for users to specify how and when they connect with mobile advertisers, thus increasing satisfaction on both sides.
Consider this a little piece of Bratt mini-history!