This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by David Heinemeier Hansson. Original Post: Russell Beattie: Web apps are just moronic Feed Title: Loud Thinking Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LoudThinking Feed Description: All about the full-stack, web-framework Rails for Ruby and on putting it to good effect with Basecamp Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by David Heinemeier Hansson Latest Posts From Loud Thinking

I woke up to the pleasant surprise this morning to see Campfire mentioned all over the blogosphere. Part of that coverage came from Russell Beattie:

Personally, I think it’s insane. If you’re a startup right now and you’ve got limited resources to get apps developed, creating Yet Another Web Service is just moronic. It’s like developing client/server Visual Basic apps in 1996. The *real* revolution is taking off already and they’re messing around with last decade’s technology.

Stages of reaction: 1) WTF?, 2) Is he serious?, 3) What is he talking about?

And this is coming from someone with an unhealthy interest in mobiles already. Someone who usually buy the latest phones, appeared on TV hyping 3G, and convinced Dave Thomas to go ebooks so I could read them on my phone. In other words, I'm a huge mobile fan, and even I have to question what kind of universe Russell is inhabiting.

Making Campfire primarily for phones would have been a horrible idea. Campfire is aimed for having long-running, text-based chatting for business in order to make ad-hoc decisions about stuff you then do. We use Campfire to decide on which features to do next, what bugs to fix now. So the context is usually not one that is as interesting if you're away from your primary work environment.

And secondly, discussing at length over most phones simply sucks. Despite having T9'ned for years and years, it's still painfully slow compared to a full-size keyboard. I have both AIM and IRC applications on my phone, but they've rarely served as anything but party favors. As in "look what you can do with a mobile these days!". For practical use, it's very rare that I can't hold whether I'm interested in saying until I get in front of a real keyboard. Or that I think it beats just calling or sending a one-off SMS.

So I caution anyone to take Beattie's hyper excitement for the mobile as platform as sound business advice. Yes, there are indeed a handful of apps that has a perfect fit for when you're away from the computer or targets a demographic that use the mobile more than computers, but its certainly not the bulk of them. And definitely not in this space.

I also hope Yahoo is not listening too much to this. I'd hate to see them follow this advice and treat the computer as a second-rank device after the mobile. Although I'm sure Google would love to see them make that kind of priorities.