I’ve been working with the Mobile Web for 10 years now, and I can tell you there are a number of things that those new to this world would find shocking if they were to catch wind of them. A few examples …

First, there’s a recent AP story documenting an account switching incident involving Facebook users on AT&T. The culprit? Mis-configured gateways on AT&T’s network caused users private data, stored as browser cookies, to get mixed up, giving some people access to accounts that don’t belong to them. This is not the first time such a thing has happened, in fact we’ve seen it on nearly every major wireless network in North America. It can take carriers weeks, and in some cases months to identify these situations and address them. On a related subject, cookie support in general can be somewhat sketchy, with things like expiration times not being honored or data just disappearing.

Next we have frequent outages, either full, such as the recent incident involving T-Mobile Sidekick handsets, or partial as seems to happen every so often on Blackberry’s network. Outages on the Mobile Web are far more common, and often far longer in duration, than outages at major wired ISPs, with the carriers often never acknowledging such incidents to their customers or partners.

Then there are the transcoders. Many of the major networks use them in an attempt to make PC Websites accessible on less capable mobile browsers. This sounds great, however they often cause sites which are made for the Mobile Web to render improperly, or worse, make them completely unusable. In some cases the carrier may have a white list of Mobile Web sites that should bypass the transcoder, leaving it to the site owners to submit a request to be included. In others, there may be no white list and so other workarounds must be sought.

In short, those who only develop for the PC Web don’t know how lucky they are