Russell posts about Mobile Web Page Thoughts, in particular bringing up the need to both create and consume from mobile devices. I think there are some great points in there, such as devices coming with bound server space. Personally, I woudn’t like my mobile devices to work this way, but that’s cause I’m a hacker. I would rather have everything work the way I want than have it work automatically. But I can certainly see the value of the device having default associated space for content. Services like this are very much what I would like to make as part of the Open Palm Environment. Like I mentioned a long time ago on a completely different website, the existing network sync for the Palm is pathetic. I would love to see a real network sync tool, something using open standards and a decent protocol framework. This is something that the pilot-link and Plucker developers seem to groove on quite a bit as well. Then either users could setup the server on their own space, or someone could make a business out of hosting it as a service. Either way, I really don’t care. This then becomes the framework for uploading web content from your Palm device. Maybe the content is meant to be accessed by you only, such as your address book or calendar by default. Or you could chose to present a front end so people could browse your content online, or even allow others to directly sync your calender to their palm as well. And there’s no reason to restrict this to palm apps either. If the servers were defined using web services this framework could provide sync between all your applications. Your laptop and home PC and work PC could all use a contacts app that syncs through the same service that your PDA uses. New applications could exchange backup data with flags telling what data the user wants public and what data should remain private. This is how I think Palm devices should start talking to the world, directly over the network to servers which can:

  • provide backup services

  • provide syncronization between multiple applications on multiple platforms

  • allow palm users to directly collaborate

  • publish information to the web at large, presenting standard HTML pages for viewing and editing

Makes sense to me at least.