In front of a standing-room only crowd, Om Malik, founder of GigaOmni Media, kicked off an afternoon panel pitting mobile versus web and did his best to dig up the details everyone wanted to hear from the likes of Nokia (NYSE: NOK), MySpace, Facebook and Skydeck. Neither MySpace or Facebook would disclose the exact number of users or traffic they’re seeing on mobile, but both said it’s an incredibly important area of growth for social networking.

—As a developer how do you decide whether to focus on building a browser-based or native application? In an ideal world, developers would be able to decide what’s best based on what they’d like to achieve with their application, said Jason Devitt, CEO of Skydeck. “The reality in the marketplace … is that developers are usually facing a whole other set of criteria.” Partly because third-party browsers weren’t as pervasive as they are today, most of the development growth has been on the application side, he said. Mike Baker, VP and head of Nokia’s interactive group, said recent internal metrics show that the browser is really starting to take off. Brandon Lucas, senior director of mobile business development at MySpace, concurred. WAP will be the most ubiquitous offering for the foreseeable future, particularly for low- to mid-tier devices, but “there’s just a lot you can’t do in WAP.” There’s no way to integrate a WAP site with a device’s address book, camera or location-based services. “I don’t think anyone’s doing mobile to replicate the PC on a smaller screen,” Baker said. To be contextual an application has to integrate with everything available on a device. “Think about the business model and where are you going to market in the world … This is such a new revenue model opportunity and yet so many of the applications are predicated on a vibrant ad-supported mobile ecosystem.” Devitt added: “At this point, I’d say you’re crazy if you’re trying to do a Java application.”

—Balancing between reach and capabilities: MySpace thinks it’s detrimental to not make a play on new platforms like the iPhone despite their relatively small scale, Lucas said. If it didn’t develop for the iPhone, it would simply drive users to the competition. “I think one of the first things you need to ask yourself is ‘where are your customers?’” Lucas said. “MySpace users are very active on the iPhone—that was a natural decision for us.”

—What’s missing?: “I don’t think the industry’s spending a lot of time on what’s the value of a click on a device … Why is it so valuable to have a consumer that’s out and about clicking on their mobile phone?” Baker said. “The industry’s sort of like nobody’s home when it comes to providing that thoughtful analysis.”

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