Hey Rich, speaking of, I typed clearspring.com all by itself into my browser the other day and got an error. Looks like the default IP there doesn’t map to the same thing as http://www.clearspring.com. Not that I assume you have all that many typeins, but still, I know you had at least one who was confused.

Thanks Mike! We just upgraded the main site and it looks like our A records were overwritten, but it wasn’t visible till recently when we shut down older servers.

Sometime today they should all be redirecting correctly.

dotMobi talked about this on our blog today. You may not agree but I think it’s worth considering all viewpoints. See http://dotmobi.typepad.com/dotmobi/2008/02/do-you-have-the.html.

Vance. I understand where your post is coming from, but I don’t agree. Mobile formatting is not akin to geo localization. Not at all.

Even looking at the trivial evolution of this, if we segment mobile formatted content from web content, how then do we further segment the mobile content into localized information? Do you want a .mobi.uk? That’s getting a bit much, don’t you think?

In fact, I’d argue in the opposite direction. I think instead of forcing the user to identify their locale on the web, companies should do an IP geo lookup and forward to the correct localized site. Sure everyone can’t afford an enterprise-class IP lookup service, but BMW certainly can.

Your point about indexing mobile content better through the .mobi domain may have some merit, but not for long. Search engines are getting smarter, and there are many metadata cues that can be used to index properly.

Moving forward, URLs will take a back seat to search and default browser behavior. If I have a brand name, I want a .com domain because that’s the first thing a browser tries if a user only types a single word, and empirically, I see that search engines put .com domains that exactly match single word searches first.

If you get all the phones in the world to default to .mobi first, and all the search engines to place .mobi domains at the top of the list when searching from mobile, then I might buy in.

But as it stands now, if I have a brand name, I want a .com after it, and I want to have as much smarts at the front door as possible to get people to the right content based on their location and their device. Right now that’s the absolute best way to get the most users to the content they want.

[...] from .Mobi was nice enough to send a counter point to my last post. The .mobi versus autodetection debate has gone on for a while, and I’ve stayed out of it, [...]

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