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That Mobile Top Level Domain, .mobi

Posted on July 12, 2005
Filed Under Mobile Computing |

Either way, the new TLD is coming now and I think there’ll be lots of opportunity for content providers to take advantage of the new domain.
Link: Russ Beattie

I’m sorry Russ, but the praticalities, especially for a content business, makes this smell like a really bad idea.

What’s wrong with just getting your website to work out what browser is being used and supply a relevant style sheet. Hainvg a ~”PDA version” of your site (http://mobile.allaboutsymbian.com/ or http://news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm are great examples) is just as valid, and in fact has been the recommended practice for as long as I can remember. The whole point of the web is that it is platform agnostic (generally speaking) so having a quarantied section for small screen devices with low connection speeds is wrong. That’s what proxies are for. That’s what smart Opera or NetFront developers are for. That’s why you can detect what client app is asking for an html page and give them the right one! This article probably puts it best. Will .mobi be only for mobile devices? Can my desktop browse there? Is it restricted to a certain platform? And if these handset makers and operators need a different flavour of MIDP Java for every handset, what does that say about their chances of getting a coherent set of html/xml tags in place? What will they do once the tags are in place and Apple launches an iPhone that adds it’s own specific mobile tags to make ITMS integration easier?

I especially love (and when I say love I mean resigned through gritted teeth) that everyone is being co-erced into buying a .mobi domain. For example, If Rafe and I don’t have http:/www.allaboutsymbian.mobi/ then anyone can try to grab anyone who browses there by mistake. It’s impossible for any business to take the risk of not buying their mobile domain. But there again, the join administrators of .mobi (Nokia, Vodafone and Microsoft) have suggested that the jointly owned company behind .mobi will have an annual income of tweleve million euros in the next two to three years, generating a total estimated income of forty one million euros through the next four years. Because every content business can’t not buy their .mobi domain.

Of course companies behind .mobi were the same companies convinced that we wanted a cut down web experience over Wap, and all the content providers will follow. They didn’t, and Wap is just never mentioned nowadays, even though it’s powering Vodafone Live and T-Zones. Now, instead of motivating us to follow their idea of the Yellow Brick Road, fear will force us all to make the .mobi domain a ’success.’