Kudos to Vance Hedderel, Director of PR & Communications for dotMobi for posting this comment on my somewhat vocal .mobi .sucks .eggs post:
I’m always surprised by the vehemence people express in regards to the perceived effort in typing “.mobi”; I suspect you will start to see mobiles with “.mobi” programmed in the interface, so the typing issue — if it is an issue — becomes moot.
However, in the comments above, I’m more surprised by Shawn McCollum’s comment that he’s “worried that mobi will become a large walled garden.”
We’ve talked about this on in our blog’s “Misconceptions” series (see http://dotmobi.typepad.com/dotmobi/misconceptions/index.html). The short answer: (1) the freeform address entry required to enter a .mobi URL is the antithesis of a walled garden, (2) the business model of a walled garden of content and services has not worked (think AOL) and (3) of the 13 investors in mTLD, only three are mobile operators — the rest are device manufacturers, service operators and software companies, none of whom stand to gain from a walled garden.
I’m prepared to keep my mind open to the potential of .mobi. Vance taking the time to post this comment certainly prompts me to redress my viewpoint.
So, sitting back… what really bothers me about it?
Well. The fact that my mother knows ‘.com’ and ‘.co.uk’ back to front. It is ubiquitous. I don’t like the re-education requirement.
However, the other perspective is the required re-education could be quite productive. I can actually imagine one friend saying ‘.mobi??? What’s that?’ and having another lay friend say, ‘ah, that’s the mobile one.’ I recognise that could be valuable.
I always thought the natural extension should have been .mob. But as has been muted here before, ‘mob’ isn’t that conducive to legal and commercial activities. ‘Mobi’ is a bit friendlier.
The extension grates on me — together with the believe that I think content should be dynamically repurposed for any device irrespective of domain name.
But, ok. I get it. I buy it. Still uncomfortable with it.
Ok Vance. You challenged me and I can’t actually think of a better alternative. I am warm to .mobi.
If ewan.mobi is free, I’ll have it….
Right, so I’m in the same sort of boat to you E; it makes me uncomfortable, coupled with how much the .mobi org. wants for an organisation to become an ‘advisor’. But that aside, XHTML and other standards based approaches to making websites compatible with mobile devices is more important than appending a largely useless new TLD that says “you can use me on a mobile”, when the TLD administrators don’t do anything in the way of providing backend dynamic resizing of existing .com/.co.uk URL’s for a mobile audience.
The .mobi extension is, imho, a marketing endeavour; it is one which may be successful in both bringing mobile web to a more mainstream audience, and also motivate more companies to create standards compliant sites suited for mobile devices. This isn’t necessarily a great thing however, as it also means that in many cases, instead of repurposing a .com/.co.uk etc site for mobile, seperate instances will be created in their entirety (think crappy WAP), created a tiered internet that doesnt provide half of the features or services I want when visiting a website (think AJAX, CSS, Flash etc).
For me, I would far prefer to see web developers using standards based languages as proscribed by the W3C, and for the W3C and others lobby the handset manufacturers and operators drop their deals with browser providers like Openwave (who although do a fine job for WAP sites, don’t know how to build a browser that dynamically optimises *real* websites for mobile) in favour of intelligent and forward thinking browsers like Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. What use then is .mobi?
.mobi is here and we’ve given our money to them to protect ourselves. Now that it’s here where is it going and how does it keep the money coming in in the future. They’re pretty open about getting the use of .mobi as the default tld for phone browsers. This is a problem for site operators because mobile access to the web is going to exceed desktop use, maybe not soon but any new site now has to buy a mobi domain on top of there desktop tld. If your a big company you probably have your name bought in all kinds of tld’s. Then what happens to the other sites that haven’t blanketed the tld space with their name. Who should get the topix.mobi domain, topix.com or topix.net?
The domain isn’t a walled garden as we’ve defined it from experience with carrier decks. I’ll retract that statement and say it was a gross exaggeration boiling down my thoughts and feelings to a easily identifiable stereotype. The problem is that for the casual user it’s likely to be because they’ll get hit with the marketing message that mobi is for mobile and the others by default are not. If topix.net doesn’t get topix.mobi will a casual user understand that they can also use topix.net on their phone, or will that user just enter in topix for the url get a site about a canadian graphics arts company and think that topix.net sucks because their website is broken. I know probably a very small number of occurances.
If the investors really embraced the domain wouldn’t most of them have mobi sites? And certianly ones that conformed to the standards? I got a few that work well like vodaphone.mobi , but really it’s just http://www.vodaphone.com and since they have browser detect, a mobile phone going to http://www.vodaphone.com gets the same as vodaphone.mobi. Will google.mobi or blog.mobi get their domain yanked because they don’t go to a site that conforms to the manditory registrant rules specifically 4.1.1. I was really suprised that google.mobi didn’t go to http://google.com/xhtml.
As for the typing of .mobi I understand that mobiles will become programmed with .mobi. But if it can do that why can’t they be programmed with “m.”. So when I typed engadget it went to m.engadget.com and if i added www. it would replace it with m. Better yet why can’t the mobile browser send a head request, quick and small to see if the site responded with the right accept headers or a 30X redirect, and then give the user a choice to continue.
All and all it’s here and really there’s nothing I can do about it. it’s still to early to say what the effects this will have. Truthfully as a mobile website developer if mobi does bring more people to the mobile web it’s good for me. ewan sorry about the long comment.
oh yeah that’s right Vance, soon mobiles will have a button marked “.mobi” and it will sit right next to the button marked “.com”.
If ewan.mobi is free, Ewan says he want’s it…
If itagg.mobi is free, you can keep it!
Steve Procter
iTAGG.com on PC’s
iTAGG.com on Mac’s
iTAGG.com on Blackberry’s
iTAGG.com on any mobile
iTAGG.com on microwave screen
iTAGG.com on …
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