Joey Project Update

Background

Project Joey brings the Web content you need most to your mobile phone by allowing you to easily send it to your device. You can quickly mark content that is important to you and have that content always available while using your mobile phone.

The premise is this: you can use Firefox to send text clippings, pictures, videos, RSS content, and Live Bookmarks to your phone through the Joey Server. The Joey Server transcodes and keeps all of the content up-to-date. You can then use your phone’s browser or the Joey application on your phone to view and manage what you have uploaded.

The goal is to investigate the mobile space using a desktop-centric model. Like many other Mozilla projects, there are no plans to productize Joey. We will work with the community to build a compelling and usable tool that people will enjoy using.

We been experimenting with two different ways to access data from a mobile device. The first approach used a J2ME Midlet, a small application that a user installs on the device;and the J2ME Polish, an application framework for J2ME, an approach which simply uses the browser that is on the phone. We deployed a xhtml-mp mobile site that allowed users to access Joey uploads directly from the site.

What we learned:

About the experiment

Joey has been running for over one year. We incrementally added features. For a full listing of milestones met over the last year, please see the Joey Roadmap. There have been over 4400 users. The top 1% of users have an average of over 45 uploads.

About the content

Joey uploads can be items such as text, videos, or images.

We saw a similar number of each type of upload among Joey users — there wasn’t more text uploads over video uploads. Most of the text uploads were over 160 chars (thus sending by SMS required multiple messages).

Videos and images were transcoded as required using the open source tools ‘convert’ and ‘ffmpeg’. For every user, we know what sort of capabilities their device has, including screen size. Using this information, we optimized the content for their specific needs. For example, images were scaled to the devices screen size, and converted to PNG (a format that is recognized my most, if not all, phones).

We also experimented with other types of Uploads. For example, we extended the notion of Microsummaries to the mobile device, allowing the “cloud” to process the microsummary and notify the device of any change. We did something similar with RSS feeds. Both were used much less, but this might be attributed to being a late feature addition. Both of these forms of Uploads were “rich” media and required a browser to render.

Mobile Software

On the mobile device, we provided both a Java J2ME client as well as a xhtml web site. There were tradeoffs in both approaches. This is not meant as a formal breakout of features, but rather my personal observations on the technologies.

J2ME

The J2ME application offered the users the ability to persist content on their device allowing the user to not have to access the network to retrieve any of the Joey uploads. This persistence may be critical in places that have no network connectivity.

The J2ME application also offered an icon as a very easy way to get to their Joey Uploads. In the standard location of he application has its own icon in a standard location. Users didn’t have to type in a URL into their browser, instead they could just click on the Joey Icon and the J2ME client knew were to go.

Of course there were drawbacks:

First, Java J2ME is “Write Once, Run Anywhere”. Even with the J2ME Polish framework, there were many devices which Joey ran on that simply did not work. A common complaint was that different key on various devices did not do what “they were suppose to”.

Secondly, J2ME on most production phones has a very strict security model. On most phones the J2ME security model caused our unsigned application to complain about making a network connection each and every time we wanted to make update the content. This may have been fixed by signing the J2ME application.

Lastly, you had to install the application. Unlike SMS messaging or the browser on the device, there isn’t a zero cost setup. You have to figure out which device you have, have a SMS sent to your phone with the right URL to the installer, download this installer, and finally install it.

The Web

Using the web offers similar tradeoffs most involving the immature featureless state of the browsers that ship with phones.

For example, most mobile browsers don’t remember user/password. This requires you to re-login each and every time you go back to the site. Most browsers are dumb and require you to conform to the most basic markup — nothing very fancy. Lastly there is even less information about the browser that ships on a given phone, than there is about the J2ME VM that ships on a phone.

On the plus side, there is zero-cost install, finding people that know how to do web dev is easier than J2ME, there are no silly warnings that you are about to download content, and the browser is allowed to launch helper applications (such as a video player) more easily than J2ME.

What is next:

Though our Joey usage data is inconclusive about whether “send to phone” is a must-have for people, it seems worthwhile and important to continue to explore the relationship between the desktop and mobile Web experiences.

We are now stepping back and broadening our investigation beyond “send to phone”, and looking more broadly at the relationship between a person’s desktop-based Firefox and any mobile devices a person may have. We would like to work together with you to generate ideas around the this relationship and create new prototypes to explore these ideas.

For example:

1. Creating a new mental model and user interface for Joey, for example, avoiding the “upload” paradigm; for example, by providing a PC-based virtual representation of a user’s mobile phone as a Firefox Add-on (or independent Prism app) so that sending something to your phone is as easy as dragging and dropping it there. A potentially useful mobile browser home page could include those snippets that a user has dragged to the phone.

2. Use cases that work just fine with SMS messaging; this has essentially universal reach and utility, and could generate interest in mobile browsers as those users move from SMS-only to mobile browsing.

3. Explore new user interface approaches to Microsummaries.

4. Streamline the sign up and usage by removing the need to registration where possible.

In the meantime, I would like to invest as little as possible into ensuring that the existing Joey service works day-to-day. That means, when it breaks, it is going to stay broken. If you feel strongly about this, please do speak up.

I have started a topic in the Mozilla Labs forum for your feedback and ideas. I hope that you will jump in to the conversation. x