When I started writing for Inside iPhone, I promised that I'd talk about why iPhone web apps are still important. I decided to make good on that threat this week.

One of the reasons that I think its necessary to build websites that are iPhone-friendly is that lots of people will surf to your website before thinking of picking up your free app in the App Store. Do you want those people to have the somewhat-degraded user experience that comes from using a version of your website that's intended for a desktop or notebook computer?

I think sites that are serious about cultivating iPhone users as their customers should strive for a three-tiered approach in the future:

1. a minimal iPhone-friendly website that presents your site's highest value content, and links to access your full website and your iPhone app from the App Store,
2. a traditional website, and
3. an iPhone app in the App Store.

I started looking at major websites that have released iPhone Apps through the App Store to see what their current web presences look like on the iPhone. Here are a few results:

• Facebook: This social networking site illustrates the best practice in my view. Most users undoubtedly interact with their full website. iphone.facebook.com is their web app which points you to their main website for some web-based operations. Facebook also has a good, free app in the App Store, although I no longer see an advertisement for it inside the iPhone web app version of their site.
• Hotels.com: I find myself referring to this website again and again, in spite of the fact that I have never used it to book a hotel room. Their www.hotels.com/iphone is arguably more useful than the Hotels.com offering in the App Store. All the iPhone app does is provide a large button labeled "Hotels Near Me" which makes a call to Core Location when clicked and passes the location to Safari as a starting point for hotel reservations. That's a waste of memory, particularly on 8-Gigabyte iPhones.
• Evernote: I love the desktop app on the Mac, the iPhone app is a work in progress as far as I'm concerned. Version 1.3 of the iPhone app crashes quite a bit less than it has in the past. They have an iPhone webapp at www.evernote.com/iphone, which appears to be at least partially broken as I write this. You can't leave a web app in that sort of state for long.

Twitter has a generic mobile site, which looks pretty bad on the iPhone, but it works whenever Twitter does.

It's not fair to compare Twitter to the sites listed above because Twitter gets other people to write iPhone clients for it, such as Twitterific. If Twitter were smart, they'd take advantage of the economic downturn and buy Hahlo from Dean Robinson.