Techdirt Wireless commented today about an article that claims that quotes Google research saying that 20% of cell phone searches are for porn. Sounds about right. A cursory look at our search query logs proves that the demand for mobile porn is alive and well. It seems there are people who can’t be away from porn for a few hours. It sounds crazy, but replace “porn” with instant messaging, eBay, MySpace, gaming, blogging, etc. and it turns out that there are a number of internet activities people can’t be without for even a few hours, and they use their phones (and Skweezer) to quiet their urges until they can get back to a computer.
While I’m on a subject I don’t plan to revisit soon, we have gotten complaints occasionally that Skweezer shows everything but porn images, as if Skweezer filters objectionable content. We don’t filter content (I think we’re currently “unavailable” in China), but there are several reasons why images may not show on a given page when viewed through Skweezer:
- Most obviously, one can turn off all images in Skweezer. The page can be reloaded with images turned on. The option to view images may not be available on really old phones that have severe memory limitations and will actually crash if they have too much data.
- Even if images are enabled, the parsing engine removes the biggest and smallest images from the page if the dimensions are specified with “height” and “width”. Usually this takes care of backgrounds and spacers.
- Images may be loaded with CSS, objects/plug-ins (like Flash) or JavaScript, and Skweezer removes all of those by default.
- Images are removed from the backgrounds of elements like tables. Don’t ask me why site authors avoid using the perfectly good IMG tag, maybe they enjoy a challenge.
Skweezer does not yet do dynamic image optimization(2007 update: we do this now, as of Skweezer 4.0), mostly due to our current bandwidth and processing limitations. To optimize an image, we’d download it on our users’ behalf, resize it to fit their screens, compress and deliver it directly. It’s on the project list, but almost nobody has asked for this feature. Instead, Skweezer converts all image URLs into absolute URLs so that the original site still hosts the image files. Some sites (many of them porn sites) consider this stealing and therefore prevent their images from being hosted on other sites.
We have a solid technology roadmap and growth plan to deal with many different content types, not just HTML. Skweezer will continue to adapt to fulfil its mission of adapting general internet content for mobile browsers. I will save my AJAX rant for another time.
Posted in Skweezer, browsers, mobilizing
