[AoyW] Nokia Releases Mobile Web Server

Nokia's open source Mobile Web Server software turns your Symbian phone into an Apache server. (They should have called it the Pocket Web Server.) Browsers reach your phone via the internet through a gateway component, which routes traffic to the wireless service. It makes the phone in your pocket internet-addressable, provided you have a data plan on your phone.

How would you use this? Personal publishing and file-sharing come to mind, e.g. offering photos and recordings of the event you're attending to an audience of friends. Everything you capture is immediately accessible to them, without a separate step to post it.

This is pretty cool, but it's not what I mean by the always-on-you web. The reason to carry a web server, or more importantly a web application server, is to enable productivity and team apps with a web UI. That is, a UI where interlinked pages, with hypermedia content, are the focus, instead of files/folders, applications, and a stack of windows. A web UI also allows you multiple local screens, each of which may view different pages in your webs/wikis. Users would naturally want to share some pages; those would be sync'd peer-to-peer, whenever net connectivity is available.

The portable web app server gives you a framework for online web apps like Writely and Basecamp, without driving your data onto the grounds of a third party, nor forcing you online whenever you need to edit. (That's key; most knowledge workers can't simply sign up at an online app service and start posting company data to it; you have to get approval from IT mgmt. That's not just a pain, it isn't very gosh-darn likely!) This personal web service could run on a wi-fi smartphone, an Origami slate, or from a flash drive on any available PC.

Update: Turns out that this post is a decent response to Gabor Cselle's recent musing, What's Missing in Web 2.0?.

Thanks to Oliver at MobileCrunch for alerting me to the news.