GolfHub announced that it had officially gone mobile.
The site had already been sending me tee-time alerts around Colorado. Now the search was supposed to fit on a phone. Find an opening, check a course, and make a reservation without being at a computer.
That sounds ordinary now. It was not ordinary in 2008.
Mobile websites were stripped down, inconsistent, and often slow. Phones were getting better quickly, but a desktop product did not automatically become useful on a small screen. Somebody had to decide which part mattered enough to keep.
For GolfHub, the answer was obvious: available tee times. The huge HTML email announcing the change was much less restrained. It carried old table layouts, inline styles, image URLs, navigation, support links, and a remarkable amount of code just to tell me that the service now worked in the palm of my hand.
I liked both sides of it. Golf was something I wanted to do. The product problem was also easy to understand. A tee time loses value when the time passes. Mobile access could turn an empty slot into a booked round while somebody was still deciding what to do that afternoon.
My inbox from this period was full of early versions of that shift. Stores, gyms, travel sites, sports products, and social networks were all trying to follow people away from the desktop. Some did it well. Many sent a giant email explaining their much smaller website.
There is no evidence that I booked a round from my phone that day. The email only proves the feature reached me and that I kept the GolfHub alerts coming.
The tee time had become mobile before the announcement had learned to be brief.