The shrinking web

The launch of Apple iphone shook the smart phone market and has resulted in a fierce competition for dominance of smart phone market. On Monday Nov 10 2008 wireless research group NPD released a report revealing that Apple Incorporated’s iPhone 3G had become the top-selling handset throughout the United States amongst adult customers, thus having outrun the Motorola RAZR phone.

No matter who ends up being on top of this smart phone war, one thing is clear, consumers are getting a wide range of options accessing internet from their mobile devices and as a result almost all popular websites have developed mobile phone friendly web pages. The graph below published by Nelson shows the rapid growth in mobile access in US. If this trend of 30% growth in mobile users continues for 5 years, more than 150 million users would be accessing internet from web pages.

Currently all the top 10 websites in Alexa.com's most visited sites have a mobile version of their websites. As of Nov 2008 the top 10 sites are Google, Yahoo, Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, Live.com, msn, wikipedia, ebay and AOL. If this trend continues almost every website will have a smaller sized, mobile friendly webpage. Many of this websites will continue to have both wide screen and mobile webpages running in parallel so its not a complete shinking of all the pages of the web but if you consider the average size of all the webpages you will notice the shrinking.

If the last 5 or 10 years saw non-IT companies being aggressive in getting their web pages ready for the regular internet users and the next 5 years should see more and more non-IT companies developing mobile friendly pages not only because it is necessary for revenue generation but also for making their businesses visible to a wider population. It is also a good time for developer to finally have a compelling reason to use MVC ( model View Controller) and other architecture patterns which have the separation of visualization, business logic and data at its core.