Blog

Recognizing that localization plays a critical role in the mobile user experience, we have localized parts of MojiPage into Japanese (日本語), Simplified Chinese (简体中文), and Traditional Chinese (繁體中文).

If your browser tells us your preferred language, we will automatically detect and use it. Otherwise, you can go to the bottom of any page and select the language of your choice, then click the “Change” button. Also, NTT DoCoMo (NTTドコモ) subscribers should automatically get the Japanese version of the site unless they have manually set it to a different language.

We hope to bring more localization to our users from various parts of the world. If you’d like to see your language supported in MojiPage, drop us a note and we’ll try our best to add it. Of course, we welcome users to submit translations, please contact us using our feedback form!

We have just released a FriendFeed widget on MojiPage. It is currently available on our sandbox. It supports authentication as well as paging. It is implemented using the recently released FriendFeed API.

FriendFeed is a great way for you to stay in touch with your friends, and with MojiPage you get to stay in touch while on the go. Check it out here.

UPDATE June 16, 2008: We have merged the sandbox database with our live beta site http://mojipage.com/

In January, Yahoo announced the first preview of their mobile widget platform. Being in the mobile widget space, we were naturally excited about Yahoo’s entry into the space as it validates our vision and proves that the market is sizable. We dove in and learned more about the platform.

Essentially, you can create two types of thingies — snippets and widgets. Snippets are a simplified and less flexible version of a widget, and can appear on the Yahoo! mobile home page or Yahoo! Go home widget. Widgets, on the other hand, are richer applications with more control over the user interface layout and may span multiple screens.

Snippets and widgets are written in Blueprint — a declarative markup language based on XForms. Since Blueprint is declarative, much of the logic resides on the developer’s web server, which has the ability to dynamically serve Blueprint files to be rendered and interpreted by Yahoo servers or the Yahoo Go mobile app.

This is a different architecture from our own MWA, but each has its own merits. From the end users’ perspective, though, there is absolutely no difference. Anything that can be written using Blueprint (with server-side scripting) can be achieved using MWA, and vice versa. We think that Yahoo has done a great job in designing an elegant widget platform. In fact, we like it so much that we have developed a prototype to support Yahoo mobile widgets on MojiPage! We did say that MojiPage is a widget platform, didn’t we?

So if you’re developing a widget for the Yahoo widget platform, we invite you to submit your snippets and widgets onto our sandbox.

To submit your widget:

1. Visit the sandbox URL: http://sb.mojipage.com/
2. Click on “Add Widgets” on the top menu
3. Scroll down half way down the page and click on the link under “Widgets Anywhere”
4. Enter the URL to your zip archive (application bundle containing your config.xml and other metadata). We currently do not support application bundle upload yet.
5. The MojiPage server will fetch the archive and install the snippet/widget, then make it available on the “Add Widgets” screen. Make sure you specify a less common description in the config.xml file to help you easily identify it.

As this is an early preview, some blueprint tags may not be supported. However, we have tested it against the sample Twitter widget provided by Yahoo.

Should you run into any issue, feel free to leave a comment below.

Have fun hacking!

“Hello world!”

More specifically, “Hello Mobile Internet World!”

That’s the world that MojiPage was born into. A world of nomadic beings, more connected to each other than they ever were during the age of lesser-mobility. MojiPage redefines distributed computing, one of the key defining points of the Internet, by bringing islands of information to people and being a conduit that facilitates communication and information flow between them.

That may sound like a lot of hot air, so let’s be more concrete.

At its core, MojiPage is a mobile widget platform that is capable of hosting widgets developed using standards-based web technologies (XHTML, Javascript, CSS.) You may think of it as a blank canvas that is infinitely customizable using a variety of widgets created by anyone. Our simple-yet-powerful API lets developers perform complex calculation, syndicate remote feeds, create mashups of web services, plus anything that a turing complete language provides.

As a testimony of the widget platform, we are developing our flagship product — MojiPage (the mobile site! Yes, like a self-titled album.) It has already gone through the first round of private alpha, and we have gathered feedback and rolled them in.

While the alpha is running smoothly right now, we are working hard to develop the social aspects of the site. Yes, I mentioned “social”! IMHO, what makes our approach work better than the way most social networking sites did it is that the rather than retrofitting widgets (or app, gadget, module, whatever you wish to call it) support into social networking sites, MojiPage is a widget framework to begin with. So, widgets are first-class citizens. This allows us to easily extend the platform to embellish it with different sets of features, while still being able to separate the core platform from the packaging. More on that in another post.

Here’s a brief timeline of MojiPage:

• June 2007 - idea conceived
• September 2007 - completed working prototype. Formed team to work towards a private alpha
• November 2007 - Led a session on Mobile Widgets in MobileCampNYC2 (blog coverage by Sebastian and Dawa - thanks!)
• December 2007 - Private Alpha launched. Moji Labs incorporated.

From this point on, we will be charging ahead to refine the product and develop new features. We will also be launching our developer support site soon, so stay tuned!