Amidst a flurry of announcements about the foundation at last week's LinuxWorld, LiMo's Morgan Gillis held a kind of "state of the foundation" session on Wed., describing the foundation's seemingly realistic goal: to strike a balance between the open source ideals of collaboration and community and proprietary software's insistence on competition and innovation. “The community delivers the platform," Gillis said, "and commercial innovation thrives on top of it."

Founded in 2007, the LiMo Foundation was begun by mobile industry heavy hitters (Motorola, NEC, NTT COCOMO, Orange, Panasonic, Samsung, and Vodafone), to "create an open, Linux-based software platform for use by the whole global industry to produce mobile devices through a balanced and transparent contribution process enabling a rich ecosystem of diffrentiated products, applications, and services from device manufacturers, operators, ISVs, and integrators."

Make no mistake: LiMo is NOT a standards body, but a group of collaborators, developing a free, device-agnostic middleware upon which you can build using almost any development environment you'd like. What if you run into patent trouble? LiMo's members hold over 300,000 patents—and all of them have agreed to mutual patent non-assertion. But if a non-member should try to enforce their patent on your code, LiMo can help—if their subtantial weight can't stave the assertion off altogether.

Perhaps the most interesting facet of LiMo's strategy is its angle on solving fragmentation. Their solution lies in "reciprocation of fixes and optimization"—the user community, consisting of representatives from the entire mobile ecosystem, agree on changes to the OS. This means no forking, and—if you stay within the foundation's framework—no worries about device- or carrier-specific snags to porting your app. The more people that join the foundation, the more widespread the agreement, and consequently, the less fragmentation.

And since the platform is open, there’s nothing to stop LiMo’s users from creating their own market spaces.

Sounds reasonable, right? I guess only time will tell.

With last week's release of the 3G iPhone, things are really heating up in mobile software development. My inbox is flooded with announcements--Nokia going open source, Google phone rumors, Windows Mobile device releases. It's funny, but with these announcements comes a feeling of industry-wide willful ignorance and hypocrisy.

For instance, the entire industry has acknowledged that fragmentation has been and is a major problem (particularly for developers) within the mobile space, but this doesn't seem to be stopping anybody from developing proprietary solutions to the problem or fighting over market share. If fragmentation is such a problem for developers, how can all these companies be so busy developing software to help developers with fragmentation? Doesn’t fragmentation make *those* developers’ jobs difficult? Everyone wants to be the one who solves the problem, but each “solution” compounds the problem.

Perhaps most amusing is watching how the latest iPhone is struggling with some very Microsoft-esque problems--especially for existing iPhone customers. Sound like a Windows upgrade nightmare? Yep. I’m no fan of Microsoft per se, but does the fact that Apple is now experiencing these problems prove that absolute power *always* corrupts absolutely? Or does it just go to show that Apple was never that innocent to begin with? 

This morning, Yahoo announced a new search platform, called "SearchMonkey," which allows developers to change Yahoo's plain-vanilla search results into attractive customized results that can display information differently (or even different information) than what appears by default in Yahoo search hit lists. This new capability means different things to different people:

• For users: One way SearchMonkey would do this is by using data collected by Yahoo, attached to your Yahoo UserID, to predict what results you'd prefer. For instance, suppose I hate Amazon. I never go to Amazon to buy anything. Yahoo has gathered this from my search history. So it deliberately de-privileges Amazon results for any search I do, which is one thing I don't understand. Is it really that much of a hardship for people to look at the URLs in any given search result and skip the ones that don't interest them? I actually like knowing what URLs contain info about my search--even if I have no intention of clicking on them.
• For web publishers/businesses: SearchMonkey will also allow web publishers and businesses to customize their site's search results. So, suppose you are searching "Pearl Art Supplies San Francisco." SearchMonkey allows the Pearl people to customize their results so the search result returns the address, phone number, and a picture of the front of the store.

As developers, you'll be able to customize search results in two different ways: you can customize the regular search result format ("Enhanced Results"), or you can create what Yahoo is calling Infobars, which expand below the primary search result and contain metadata about the result.  

For the desktop, this seems to me like customization for customization's sake. How lazy and spoiled do we want to be?

The only way I can see this being anything but superfluously useful is when it comes to mobile device users with limited screen space and concerns about network time. Taking the previous example of searching for Pearl Art Supplies: the new customized results with the address, phone #, and storefront pic are not that much more useful to me at my desktop than standard search results. Maybe saves me a couple of clicks. But if I’m wandering around San Francisco’s Market Street trying to find the store? Those customized results are extremely helpful. My results fit on my device's screen, they're exactly what I need, and I'm not using valuable network time clicking on link after link to find the info I need.  

Perhaps what this really landmarks is the first major step towards tailoring search permanently towards mobile devices.

Such was Sun developer Terrence Barr's lament Tuesday night when he asked his Birds of a Feather session participants if they agreed with his portrayal of the arduous and frustrating road mobile developers traverse when trying to get their apps to the market.

"The playing field is heavily tilted towards the established players and companies," says Barr. "Many decisions were made by individual companies with their own business plans, etc. but they didn't think about the effect on the larger ecosystem. And now they need the "interesting content" and they need developers, who need a foot in the door."

Barr and mobile consultant Sean Sheedy have had enough and they think it's time to get organized.

Tuesday night, Barr (a Sun developer) and Sheedy (an independent wireless consultant) scheduled their Birds of a Feather session to gauge community interest in the formation of a Mobile Developer's Alliance. Their intention is for the alliance to be a mitigating influence on the sometimes short-sighted industry decisions made by carriers, manufacturers, etc. that are primarily based on business interests rather than technical efficacy.   

As throughout history, whenever rabble-rousers ply their trade, their idea(s) are met with agreement in principle, but with less enthusiasm when it comes to actual commitment. Most of the participants' comments seemed to focus that hesitancy on concerns about strategy.

However, because Barr and Sheedy seem committed to making their alliance a community effort, they were unwilling to lay out any but the most basic steps: gauging interest, compiling a list of grievances, and planning action items.

Do you think developers need a collective voice in the mobile ecosystem? Check out their nacsent web site nascent website for more information: https://mobiledeveloperalliance.dev.java.net

If you've been living under a rock for the last month, you may not have heard about the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week. As I'm the Mistress of All That Is Mobile around here, I spent my time at Web 2.0 in sessions about Mobile 2.0. On the last day of last week’s Web 2.0 Expo, Marc Davis, Yahoo Deep Thinker (his title is actually "Social Media Guru”), gave one of the most interesting talks, titled "Understanding Mobile: From Web 2.0 to World 2.0." Marc spoke about how your mobile device "mediates between the web and the world." Quoting a prediction that soon your mobile device will replace both your keys and your wallet, Davis further predicted that your device will track how you move through space, time, and social situations. Pictures taken with your device will not only have date and time stamps, but also other contextual information such as the GPS coordinates of your location when you took the picture. This type of  contextual information increases the possibilities for machine intelligence by a significant percentage. 

To describe the kind of context-based data your device will be collecting, Davis urged attendees to imagine that they had, of an evening, gone out drinking with buddies, gotten really drunk, and then woken up—face in the gutter—in a foreign country, with no idea how they'd arrived there. In the Web 2.0 world, your device would be able to provide you with context in such a situation: your LBS would tell you location, the clock would tell you the time, and, after getting your bearings, looking up your credit card account might even begin to help you piece together the rest of the evening that you don't remember, including charges from the last bar you were at, and maybe your airline and flight time. Cool, fine. But now that you know where you are and you've got a pretty good idea of what you did last night, who else knows? Now's the time that the TGIFriday's in Hong Kong texts you with a two-for-one deal on Bloody Marys.

It seems that our fears about the compelling nature of the Internet creating a generation of worm-pale, agoraphobic, socially-stunted hermits have given way to fears of a generation of 1440 minute-a-day consumers. "Where are you paying your attention?" Davis asked. This is not only what advertisers want to know, but what other speakers in a different session insisted developers need to know, to create applications that advertisers will want to sponsor. And according to Davis, Web 2.0 devices will collect it for them. So now that "they" know where you're "paying your attention," you're liable to have someone in your face selling you something at every turn. Unlikely, you say? No one would send you unwanted messages? Well, we haven't been able to stop spam, have we? I know I spent about 25 minutes this morning deleting it.

However, for the purposes of this blog, I'm not really that worried about advertisers and their spam. I'm worried about what I’m calling the “politics of access.” How much of a choice will we have about what information is recorded and who sees it? Will we be able to turn off some of these data-collecting functions? Hopefully.

Davis also mentioned the recent attempts to aggregate our social networking profiles (MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.). Really? Do I really want to be contaminating my Facebook high school contacts with my professional LinkedIn contacts? I don’t know about you, but I freaked out when I received a MySpace friend request from my mother. My MySpace page is for friends my age. Cool as she is, my mother doesn’t really need to see, or know, what kinds of things I’m sharing with people my age.

What’s really at issue here is the boundary collapse between our private selves and our professional selves. How much access do we want to allow people in our professional lives to our personal and vice versa? Are we really looking forward to this "social mobile ecosystem"? If college kids can be denied jobs because of what's on their Facebook pages, can a prospective Microsoft employee get fired for working on a Ubuntu release in his spare time? What if you're in a death metal band and your boss thinks this is amoral? In reverse, what if some mentally unstable former romantic interest finds your MySpace page and, because you've got it hooked up with your LinkedIn, starts harassing people in your deparment? 

I suppose it's natural that in such a self-obsessed culture, where many willingly broadcast all kinds of personal information into the ether, we're going to have to get used to people knowing (or expecting to know) where you are and even perhaps what you are doing, 24-7. And while the melding of private time and work time theoretically leads to a more holistic, less compartmentalized life (re: a good thing), my hunch is that it will probably only go one way. Areas that were once "private" territory will continue to be exposed as public--this accessibility is leading to the colonization of our private selves. Our "private lives" as we knew them, will cease to exist. Nothing will "stay in Vegas."