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It’s good for governments to find more ways to connect with their citizens, including the web. As the web goes mobile, open government should too. But governments shouldn’t develop apps for some mobile platforms and not others.

That’s Kevin Curry and Brownell Chalstrom’s problem with Texas.gov’s new iPhone app. The state of Texas recently overhauled its website for the desktop, but doesn’t have a mobile version. It also doesn’t have applications for Android, Blackberry or any other mobile platform.

This heated up discussion at the recent Govfresh Gov 2.0 conference in Manor, Texas. Curry, founder of the open government unconference City Camp, said that by limiting access to one platform and one device — and an expensive device, at that — Texas is empowering the already empowered, rather than broadening access for everyone.

Given the potential use cases and the sheer number of citizens whose only net-capable devices are mobile phones, mobile access to government data is definitely important. The trouble is when governments pick winners and losers, developing a presence on iPhone but not Android, or Facebook but not MySpace.

It’s not only the numbers of iPhone or Facebook users that attract governments. It’s the prestige. According to O’Reilly Radar’s government 2.0 reporter Alex Howard, “government technology shops, judging by their output, have become afflicted with a kind of ’shiny app syndrome,’ given that an app is a substantive accomplishment that can be trotted out for officials and the public.”

Brownell Chalstrom, a Manor Govfresh delegate, says that governments looking to develop for mobile should first look to create open websites using rich web standards like HTML5 and CSS3, and only then look to develop applications for platforms limited to users of an individual device or service. Open standards for open government, if you will.

“The goals that public officials pursue when they create new .gov websites or applications should be based upon civic good,” Howard writes. “If that civic good is to be rendered to a population increasingly connected to one another through smartphones, tablets and cellphones, truly open governments will employ methods that provide access to all citizens, not just the privileged few.”

“Shiny app syndrome” and Gov 2.0 [O'Reilly Radar]

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Flickr has launched a new iPhone-optimized version of its site, and it looks fantastic. As you can see in the screenshots, the most used options run along the top of the page and, although there doesn’t appear to be any AJAX-y cacheing going on, the individual pages load at a fair clip.

You can do anything of the viewing you can do on the normal Flickr, although the bite-sized version doesn’t offer any editing of pictures — the Organizr, for instance, isn’t there.

But then, it shouldn’t be. It would have meant a complete rewrite of the Flash based interface for little gain — who wants to edit on the tiny iPhone screen anyway? What Flickr has done is take the essential search and viewing tools and made them small, slimline and fast. I’m testing the site out in an internet cafe (thanks for blowing up my home connection, Telefónica), and – apart from a problem loading photographs in my sets – the site has almost no delay.

Fans of slideshows will be disappointed, though. There aren’t any. For that you’ll need a standalone iPhone application Like Fraser Speirs’ Exposure. Sadly, Yahoo’s experimental AJAX-based Flickr site for the iPhone, which offered slideshows, seems to have been taken down.

Product page [Flickr via ★ ]

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