Major new mobile web services roll out

[Bob Russell]

The Washington Post reports that "Google yesterday unveiled a mobile version of its personalized home page for subscribers to its service and updated its mobile Google Maps feature to include live traffic updates. Yahoo Inc. last week announced that its Yahoo Go for Mobile, a Web application that combines e-mail, search, address book and local information programs, would be preloaded on millions of Motorola handsets."

There's bound to be more and more interest in providing mobile web services as the number of web-enabled phones multiplies. Even more importantly, people will start using those features on the phones they own. That's a huge audience across the world.

Google describes Personalized Home for Mobile this way - "Personalized Home puts information that you care about on your mobile phone. It's a quick way to access your Gmail inbox, news headlines, local weather, stock quotes and RSS feeds when you're on the go."

Google Maps for mobile is pretty neat, but still doesn't support some handsets like the PalmOS Treos.

Yahoo Go for Mobile looks nice, but at first glance I'd have to say it's hard to tell what the advantage is above and beyond WAP access to the previously available Yahoo portal.

All in all, it's exciting to see more interest in the mobile web, and I guarantee that we are only just getting started!