In the future, people will think it strange…

… that the internet was ever tethered to wall sockets and floor boxes.

Now obviously the participants in a Mobile Internet Portal Strategies conference are a self-selecting bunch of enthusiasts, but last week there was a distinct sense of confidence that our moment has arrived.

People who’ve spent the best part of a decade expounding the unique benefits of the mobile internet – ubiquity, identity, location, authentication, micro-billing and so on – only to be met with blank looks from their fixed net counterparts, now see the prospect of mass adoption just around the corner.

Some even go so far as to say that the fixed web we know today will come to be seen as an historical anomaly. Why “optimise” for home and office, Windows and Mac, IE and Firefox – such a narrow subset of contexts, computing devices and browsers – when there’s a whole big wide world out there? Some evidence here.

Thanks once again to Ludo for providing a cautionary image to illustrate this post. Satisfyingly, I realised this picture of my son using our home PC was taken on my mobile phone and uploaded to Flickr using Shozu – paper wraps stone!

Updates 29/05/2008:

• Si reports on We Love Mobile
• Slides from David Cushman of Bauer
• Slides fron Paul Golding

Update 25/02/2009: An all-time fave quote from Tomi Ahonen’s Communities Dominate post – “the “picture radio” (television) was not the same as radio; so too the “mobile internet” is NOT the same as the real PC based legacy internet.”