Joel on Software - Monday, October 24, 2005: "This is where Google is actually hurt by the long tail world of millions of small sites."

This long tail thing - it's not all good, y'know. I was thinking about this the other day whilst chancing across some stats analysis we were running for a client.

We do a lot of porting work - taking mobile applications that we (or others) have written and converting them to work on new mobile phones. This is an inherent part of our business right now and whilst it's not as obviously rewarding as developing scratch, like it or not it's very necessary. There are porting frameworks which aim to help you get around this problem (in fact we wrote a rather snazzy one ourselves which we use internally) but they don't get away from the need to build and test your apps on real devices.

So which handsets do you port to? Well... there are a few biggies, a few which obviously stand out when you look at who's trying to use your service - and you should look at who the prospective audience is, up front, because different audiences will have tendencies towards ownership of different handsets. But there are a few up the top - Nokia Series 40, high-end Sony Ericssons, etc. - which are a no-brainer. But then look at the rest of them - the graph below shows the number of unsupported customers we've had for about 127 handsets which our service doesn't currently support (it has been explicitly ported to just over 40 more popular devices, of course!):

Oooh, it's a long tail - the top 19 out of 127 handsets (15% of them) which we don't currently support make up 50% of traffic. But look at the other 50% - to support these we'll incur incremental costs testing and development, so they become commercially unfeasible.

The morals of this tale?

1. "Write once, run everywhere". Stare into the mirror and say it's name three times - it doesn't appear, it's just a fairytale.
2. You need to look at your audience before you decide which devices to port to.
3. Porting costs are a matter of economics: the more you spend, the wider your audience. But it may not be commercially viable for you to widen your audience beyond a certain point.

Ends and Means: Why are we training?: "It is almost as if O-Sensei suffered from a Multiple Personality Disorder in which he was Arnold Schwarzenegger one moment and Mother Teresa the next, leaving a legacy of polarized followers, each ready to quote the Grand Master's words or deeds to support their opposing views."

The Secret To Mobile TV? Bigger Bullet Holes.: "nobody's got any idea what's going to work"

Too right! One of the most enjoyable things about this industry is that there isn't a precedent for a lot of the stuff we're doing, meaning that we're constantly learning new things about how technology, services and applications get adopted.

O2 lead for mobile data: "O2, which itself launched i-mode in October 2005, is the leading European operator for data ARPU. It generated data ARPU of US$11.8 in the UK in Q2 2005. The operator's high data revenues are achieved mainly through to its market leadership in messaging (more than 40% of UK SMS originate from an O2 subscriber)."

Yep - we see a disproportionate amount of traffic to a service which isn't currently promoted via any operator portal, all from O2.

Whoopah! Freeware support from Symbian: "As of today, all freeware developers of Series 60, 80 and 90 and UIQ  applications can have their applications Symbian Signed for free, courtesy of Symbian nd its partners, who are eager to promote freeware and the growth of the application catalogs for their platforms."

Better than nothing; but what this means is that whilst large software developers (who can afford keys) and folks working on freeware are welcomed by Symbian, the guys being discriminated against are the smaller commercial developers.