Regrettably, to turn a time-worn phrase, there’s a problem to every solution. In this case, the solution is a standardized extension, .mobi, for the mushrooming mobile web. The problem you specify, while not the only one, does not rise to the level of significance in comparison to the solution represented by .mobi. Your support of the .mobi standardization would be of greater value than your attack on it.

Thanks for your reply Dan.

My point is that I believe that the .Mobi TLD is not adding value or solving problems that other non-fragmenting solutions solve just as well, if not better.

Instead of supporting the TLD, I would love to support .Mobi as a standards organization.

At the same time I want to support the promotion of device detection logic at the front of every domain. These are solutions that exist and that I believe work better than the .Mobi TLD.

I would like to hear if anyone has specific examples, (maybe SEO, maybe user experience), that justify the .Mobi TLD.

Would love to hear especially if you know of any direct comparisons between the approaches with real-world data behind them.

Let’s not just hand-wave here. Let’s get specific.

And please don’t interpret this as an attack. I’m ready to have my mind changed if someone makes a good argument.

[...] Original post by Mobilitee [...]

From my perspective using the .mobi domain is a way for the site owner to allow end-users to choose the presentation they want. From the user perspective, using the .mobi domain is a way of saying “I’m am not at my desktop, I’m in a bus, I am in different context, I want different information”.

I don’t think SEO is of any interest at this time. SEO will adapt to whatever the industry chooses. If want to make it a matter of discoverability, .mobi is most likely easier to guess than try m., wap., mobile., whatever. and the various search engines can get updates of new domain registrations, so buying a .mobi will mean quick update from the search engine.

user experience is what makes the difference. I don’t have any number to show, but I think I mentioned a couple of use cases above.

Thanks Andrea. You said:

“… using the .mobi domain is a way of saying ‘I’m am not at my desktop, I’m in a bus, I am in different context, I want different information’”.

Shouldn’t just accessing the content from a mobile device be enough to tell the information provider that you’re on a phone and not at your desktop? Why put the burden on the user?

Some of the arguments I hear against .mobi as a TLD are similar to those I heard years ago against ccTLDs and even .com itself. Several predicted a leveling off or decline of .com and even certain larger ccTLDs when Google and other search engines started surging in popularity—when there were only about 15 million domain names in total. Now there are more than 150 million domain names, and IMHO the amount of names that will exist five years from now will astonish everyone, especially on the mobile side of the equation.

dotMobi as a TLD is totally relevant to the mobile user experience and is winning over large corporations who must not only invest just $15 or $20 dollars registering a .mobi name, but commit tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to internally vet, find and hire an agency who understands mobile (many don’t), develop a mobile presence and then promote that presence via a dotMobi name, as many leading organizations in several verticals are now doing.

Watch what they do. If they are successful they will repeat the process. Plenty more will follow just as they did with .com and the ccTLDs that are relevant. Also just as larger companies do now for their .com and even their ccTLD sites, they use a landing page with flags, language or country links to simply allow users to choose which localized content, if any, they’d like to see. IMHO there is no need for an expensive IP lookup service unless it would provide a relevant experience to the user and provide ROI to the content provider.

Thanks Pinky. It’s certainly good to bring the historical perspective into view here.

.Mobi as a promotional vehicle may work, and all it could take to break out is that one big company to push their product in a huge marketing campaign with .mobi clear and at the front.

Maybe a little country-style jingle: “Expedia… dot mobi!” Mmm.. Maybe that’s why I’m not in marketing.

That won’t happen anyway until it makes sense based on the addressable market of people seeking out random product information on phones. My gut feeling on that is that those numbers will make sense when the browsing experience and pricing plans get uniformly good. But when that happens, people will start bringing their desktop habits over to the phone – typing .com and just searching for things. It could be tough to get them to feel natural typing .mobi when they always type .com.

Are CC TLD’s relevant? I haven’t seen any big promotional campaigns around CC TLDs. What am I missing here?

Bank of America has TV and web ads for BOFA.MOBI. Virgin Atlantic airlines is running a promo right now specifically targeting New York and Chicago with LOVEFROMABOVE.MOBI. Smirnoff understands third screen dynamics with SMIRNOFF.MOBI. These are big brands doing big things on mobile utilizing .mobi as the go-to address. I’d mention more, but it’s easy to see what others are doing by visiting the dotMobi site for a list of links or a smattering of bloggers who are maintaing great lists.

I have yet to see any empirical data that demonstrates desktop PC habits are migrating to the phone. Hard statistics and reliable forecast data indicate now and moving forward the vast majority of people with access to the Internet around the planet will only have such access via their mobile phone for the foreseable future. They will not have any desktop habits to replicate or abandon. There is an entire generation of tens of millions coming at us very fast who will be completely raised on mobile Internet access.

ccTLD growth has been phenomenal—averaging 38% registration growth year over year. I have personally worked with many large corporations and lesser knowns who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars EACH YEAR registering in ccTLDs and then developing specific content for such audiences. Many are not aware that after .com, .de (Germany) is the second largest domain extension in the world in terms of total active registrations. Dot .cn (China) if fourth and .uk (United Kingdom) is fifth.

Great numbers about ccTLD’s! Thanks very much for sharing those – I had no idea their growth was that significant.

I agree that there is a generation of mobile-first users, and their habits are up to us to program. But at the same time, there’s a race to get mobile browsers performing close to the desktop. So there’s going to be a lot of user-experience bleed over to the devices. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I’m also not sold that you’re going to be able to get this generation to think “.mobi first” as these browsers start rendering desktop pages better, and more and more people do the autodetection thing at their front door.

Are there any numbers on those campaigns you mentioned? I’ve looked at the .mobi site and have seen a lot of big names there. But my concerns still remain:

- Is .mobi a stop-gap consumer-educational step before information becomes universally-accessible through intelligent detection?

- If it is, how effective are the promotions running now, and would they be more or less effective saying “Go to Smirnoff.com from your PC or mobile phone.” <– This is the data that needs to be collected and made public.

- If it is not, what does this say for the URL landscape moving forward? When I have my phone that can read desktop and mobile web content just as easily, is .mobi just a formatting chooser? How do you see .mobi evolving as mobile and desktop capabilities converge?

Rich, you wrote:
“Shouldn’t just accessing the content from a mobile device be enough to tell the information provider that you’re on a phone and not at your desktop? Why put the burden on the user?”

I don’t think it’s a burden, it’s another opportunity to the user to choose what he wants. We talk about what *most* users will want, but most is not all. I think it’s good to help users, but you should always give them a chance to go some other way. Some users will like the mobile site, some others will want to desktop site for some reason.
Talk to companies like Novarra and Openwave and they will tell you that they can bring the full web on your small device and they will tell you that bbc.co.uk is much better when rendered with their transcoding engine than what the BBC thought was appropriate for mobile devices.

I think that users should be given a chance to choose.

Andrea, I completely agree. But the point is to have reasonable defaults.

If you look at the original post that spawned this discussion, I say:

“- Put a link on the bottom of your mobile pages to get to the full version of the site.”

So in the optimal sense, the user gets the mobile version at the default front door, but can quickly switch to desktop if they want. Many sites are also setting cookies to remember users’ choices.

I am completely against Novarra and Openwave’s transgressions, and have been following the drama on the wmlprogramming group. In those cases, users are not able to choose at all, which is ridiculous. As you can see above, what I’m suggesting is not at all like that.

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