Sounds alot like how dot.coms all complained in about the policies of AOL
and Yahoo for gaining access to good positions on those sites.
Regarding DoCoMo, the role of the i-mode site needs to be understood. When
we were developing i-mode, we had to be very considerate of the user
experience, including making sure the user had a certain organized selection
of high quality content that was easily and understandably accessible. Of
course the question of what is 'high quality' is highly selective, but it is
pretty much understood in the Japanese development community.
Of course anyone can make an unofficial DoCoMo site, and anyone can charge
for there contents, (just like the fixed Internet) and in the near future
DoCoMo will allow greater access to its billing capabilities (DoCoMo could
never support every small dot-com wanting to use the billing and other
benefits of being on the portal)
anyway, I agree that DoCoMo needs to have a clear roadmap to and to open key
aspects to their platform, but it sure is funny how many content companies
I have seen asking DoCoMo (telling DoCoMo) that they deserve this and that.
Well, if we agreed, they then become an alliance partnet, if not, then they
were of course free to have an independent site, and serval have succeed
tremendously independently of DoCoMo, while many have not....
Interesting that although I see i-mode (and Ez-web) as pretty much "open
gardens", it now seems people are compling about what to plant in the first
role of the garden.... Well, I guess we should let each user decide, which
is the way DoCoMo (and the other operators in Japan) are moving.
Brian
-----Original Message-----
From: Funk Jeffry Lee [mailto:funk@rose.rokkodai.kobe-u.ac.jp]
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2001 5:41 PM
To: keitai-l@appelsiini.net
Subject: (keitai-l) Re: difficulties of becoming an official i-mode site
> Actually here you just discovered a very human characteristic...people
> love to complain and like to talk about the bad, bad DoCoMo who didn't
> discovered the full potential of THIS specific application and why it
> MUST be on the official site. So if they fail, they blame DoCoMo
> and love to talk about this to get their tears dryed.
Hi Juergen,
you are right that people like to complain but it is not just foreginers who
are complaining about docomo's (and foreign service provider's) content
selection process. the japanese and foreign presses are filled with these
kinds of articles about how mobile service providers are controlling their
service menus. for example, see the jan or feb issue of nikkei
communications. at some level docomo and the foreign service providers have
a right to control their service menus but at another level the internet is
too important for one firm to call the shots. I think that docomo should
start screening portals and search engines and not contents. let the portals
and search engines then screen the contents. docomo has better things to do
then check whether content provider's are dotting their i's and crossing
their t's properly.
Jeff Funkj
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
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Received on Tue May 8 12:31:37 2001