Over the course of the next few days, I am going to write a series of posts addressing some common misconceptions about the .mobi domain. Rather than let these misconceptions spread in the general media and blogosphere, I am going to address these on-by-one so that everyone is clear what we’re trying to do here and, hopefully, encourage some heuristic debate.
Misconception #1: The domain is unnecessary, seeing as how there are technologies in place that will autodetect the type of device that is attempting to access it and redirect or reformat accordingly.
It is absolutely true that there are many technologies that exist today, including open source solutions such as WURFL, that can be used to identify the device accessing a site, and provide an appropriately formatted page in response. Many existing .com sites do this already today, including google.com and nokia.com.
DotMobi is fully in support of such device recognition and adaptation — this is one of the central tenets of our best practices. However, the problem that dotMobi is trying to address is a different problem: It is the problem that the vast majority of existing .com and other top-level domain websites either do not work at all, or result in an expensive and miserable experience, when accessed on a mobile device. DotMobi gives users a way to pick out the sites that work, without having to resort to trial and error.
Third level domains such as wap.domain.com and mobile.domain.com do not work well for the purpose identifying mobile content, nor do special URIs such as domain.com/mobile and domain.com/xhtml because there are no enforceable standards for doing this (DNS is inherently distributed — registrants can do whatever they want with third-level domains). A top-level domain, on the other hand, can do this, and help the user to identify (and trust) mobile friendly sites.
Thanks Ronan for your clarification. I do not quite understand your point about third level domain or special url do not work well for identifying mobile content. Can you quote an example to illustrate. Thanks
Peter
Peter,
Thanks for the comment. My point is spelled out by Russell Beattie in a post on his blog a couple of months ago, but to summarize, there are many different ways to identify what sites or portions of a site are mobile friendly. The problem is they are all different and the consumer has no hope of guessing the correct address.
http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008931.html
- Ronan
Sorry, but I still don’t see the need for a mobi TLD. If the CMS is intelligent enough to do it on the layout side, why to use a mobi TLD just to figure out the company I’ve looked for doesn’t has a mobi domain. It’s the same bad user experience as getting the full blown PC version: I simply don’t get what I want on my mobile device.
Nevertheless, smart enough OS and UA sniffer can do it.
Just my 2 Cents.
Cheers ~ Arne
China Mobile mit erster .mobi-Domain
Via UMTS-Report erreicht uns die Meldung, dass sich China Mobile laut ICANN als Mobilfunkanbieter den ersten Domain-Namen für Handys gesichert hat. Darüber hinaus habe sich das Unternehmen 18 Markennamen mit Bezug zur neuen Endung .mobi schützen lasse…
There is much scope for mobile services market. Video and Audio will be much in demand.
Go into the future a few years and you will hardly recognise handsets or the speed at which services are delivered.
.mobi exists to deliver compliant content and media to massively under utilised devices, that far out number pc’s.
With the likes of google.mobi and msn.mobi providing *.mobi search results for compliant websites I see a completly new opportunity here, similar to the original explosion called dot.com.
Only now its your mobile phone saying good-bye to legacy technologies and breathing a new era of 3d screens and input devices that are literally projected from the device with speed to boot.
Don’t miss out on an excellent opportunity the land rush period is still live @ the time of this post and you’d be surprised @ how many good names are already registered.
Good Luck.
Your favourite programs are coming to a mobile near you. e.g. bigbrother.mobi coronationstreet.mobi eastenders.mobi etc.
I have no idea where to post this, but i need to call this to the attention to developers worldwide.
I develop mobile websites for NTT DoCoMo, AU KDDI, and Softbank (formerly Vodafone). The standard for mobile website development have 2 alternatives; xHTML (softbank and AU KDDI) and cHTML (DoCoMo). Will developers be slapped with a warning?
Also, I cannot view websites like godaddy.mobi on mobile phones here in Japan, but I can see them on the PC. A bad example for new developers, dont you think? Isnt one of the purposes to have .mobi is to make sites internationalized? It would be wise to check the major companies to see if they go by this standard since new developers use “VIEW SOURCE CODE” as a template.
And what is up with the WAP in the url on some of the large companies .mobi!? That is SO’OOOOOOOOO old! This is supposed to be SIMPLE, INTERNATIONALIZED, and CONTROLLED. There are quite a lot of American, Canadian, and other European mobile website developers here in Japan noticing these errors. We have also found that some of these .mobi registars have purchased and are/will auction these names that they have purchased BEFORE the landrush. Is this legal? Is this a new conspiracy? It would be a great idea to expand your company and have some members help you do checks on these criminals(?).