Devices like the iPhone and Android smartphones offer a way to carry the Internet in your pocket but there are plenty of times when a website just doesn't look right on a smaller screen. This is because most destinations are optimized for keyboard and mouse inputs and don't take advantage of the touch capabilities of these devices. As these touch devices proliferate however, we are beginning to enter a new, innovative era of the touch-friendly Web.

The touch-friendly Web now consists of 326,000 sites, according to data released from mobile search company Taptu. I recently sat down with Taptu CEO Steve Ives to discuss the company's findings and was intrigued by the impact this will have on content creators and consumers.

What makes a good touch website? Ives said properly designed interfaces utilize larger icons for a finger-friendly layout, and are lightweight to enable quicker load times over cellular data connections. If you want a great example, go to MIT's mobile site (m.mit.edu) in your phone's browser. It's easy to navigate, offers boatloads of information at your fingertips, and it just feels like the right way to browse on a touch-capable phone.

Taptu's data finds that shopping, photo/design, and social destinations were the most popular touch-friendly websites, and these all seem to make sense. For shopping sites, creating an attractive front end makes it easier for shoppers to buy on the go and using the Web allows them to easily integrate their back-end systems. Design sites should know how to optimize their content for the best aesthetics, and I've ditched my Facebook app because Facebook's mobile touch site is more than adequate for my social needs.

But the rise of the app stores makes some website owners wonder if they should be putting their resources into cool, specialized programs. Amazon's mobile website is nicely laid out and is finger friendly but I routinely use its Android apps to make my non-smartphone friends jealous while shopping. We'll be walking through a Best Buy and I can use the app's barcode-reader functionality to compare prices on the spot. I asked Ives if the mobile Web can overcome the increasing push of standalone apps.

"It's funny, a lot of people in the media like to paint it as an either/or scenario," Ives said. "Games don't really make sense for the mobile Web and benefit from being an app. Apps and the mobile Web can and will coexist."

Technology improvements will also greatly help the touch-friendly Web, as HTML5 offers a variety of improvements including high-quality videos in a mobile browser and offline access. We're also seeing advancements that enable Web developers to access a phone's accelerometer and location information from the mobile browser, and this will lead to more useful and intuitive online destinations. It will also be interesting to watch the impact that the iPad and other tablets will have on the touch-friendly Web. These devices don't have the same screen size limitations of smartphones but they rely on a similar interface paradigm.

We have to keep things in perspective though, as Taptu said the number of touch-friendly sites represents less than 1% of the millions of sites it scans. But this field is going to experience some rapid growth -- Ives expects there to be 500,000 touch-friendly sites by the end of the year and 1 million sites by the end of 2011. We're entering a brave new world folks; get your fingers ready.

Contact Marin Perez via email or follow @marinperez on Twitter