I’m cur­rently at the Web Direc­tions South con­fer­ence in Syd­ney, get­ting myself a dose of inspi­ra­tion to last for the next 12 months. We’re about to embark on the sec­ond day, so here’s some thoughts from the first.

There’s a real buzz around social net­works and the mobile web — in John Allsopp’s open­ing com­ments he said the the mobile web had “arrived” and I really think he’s right. However, I’m get­ting sick of the iPhone love-in. Yes, they’re shiny, yes they have a full browser, yes, every Apple fan­boi must have at least two. Blah blah blah. Brian Fling’s after­noon ses­sion, enti­tled “Web 2.0 + Mobile 2.0 = ?” started off great, with an overview of the  cur­rent state of mobile usage world­wide and the poten­tial — which is huge.  How­ever, the sec­ond half of the pre­sen­ta­tion was iPhone mania.

I realise that the pur­pose of the ses­sion was to look for­ward to what is likely to hap­pen in the mobile space, but I can’t help feel­ing that there’s a dis­con­nect — on one hand talk­ing about the mas­sive poten­tial of the mobile web and the stag­ger­ing num­ber of internet-enabled phones “in the wild”, but on the other, cre­at­ing iPhone-only web appli­ca­tions that don’t degrade to other devices and are there­fore only acces­si­ble to the per­cent­age of the US mar­ket that already has one. Aus­tralia is more on par with Europe and Asia in terms of mobile phone own­er­ship and usage — we’ve been using SMS for a lot longer, for exam­ple, and 3G is where things are at. So even when the iPhone does make it over, the lack of 3G will prob­a­bly restrict its mar­ket see­ing as the internet-enabled early adopters are mostly using Hutchison’s 3G net­work (3 has the best pric­ing by far).

In 2005 there were nine mil­lion mobile phones in Aus­tralia, and a pro­por­tion of them are already inter­net enabled — this is the mar­ket that I want to build mobile web sites for now. I want my mobile sites to be acces­si­ble to every­one with a net-enabled phone. So I won’t be build­ing any iPhone-only sites.