The .mobi mobile-specific domain has been getting some attention this week since its sunrise period for registrations of industry-related companies began yesterday. Its backers contend a mobile-only domain is needed to push the mobile Web forward, but .mobi could end up doing more harm than good.
The Wall Street Journal’s got a typical mainstream press article on .mobi, accepting the marketing hype behind it without question. The party line behind the domain is that it will make mobile surfing easier and better for users — “Dot-mobi makes the Internet work on phones,” says the CEO of the company behind it — but this isn’t as true as they’d have you believe.
First, the domain .mobi itself isn’t particularly friendly for mobile devices, as plenty of people have pointed out. That’s something of a superficial complaint, but a relevant one nonetheless.
A bigger issue is the idea that somehow having a mobile-specific domain will make it easier for people to find what they’re looking for on their mobile device. This isn’t necessarily true — it just shifts the question from “is it mobile.x.com, or x.com/mobile, or wap.x.com?” to “do they have a .mobi site?” And that’s assuming that somebody is going to back up .mobi with a massive marketing and education campaign to make the general public aware of its existence.
Also, one of the stipulations of the domain is that registrants’ sites will follow certain rules, or they’ll be shut down. My first objection to this is that domain registrars shouldn’t be in the business of dictating content, as it sets a very dangerous precedent, but that’s an ideological argument for another time. One of these rules is that .mobi sites must serve an entry page coded in XHTML-MP, unless the site detects a user agent that calls for a different flavor of markup. One point is that if a content provider’s audience has a need for one type of markup — say, WAP — that’s what they should be able to use, user-agent sniffing or no. But you can’t help but feel that this implicit preference for XHTML-MP has some other motives when you read a quote from a Nokia spokesperson saying “People have to have new reasons to buy new phones. That’s what we hope to happen here,” about .mobi.
So if we’re going to fall back on user-agent sniffing, why bother with .mobi at all? We’d be better off encouraging sites to simply sniff the device with which users are browsing, then serving them relevant content — and all from existing, familiar addresses. Of course, smart companies and content providers are already doing this, without spending the extra money and resources on a .mobi site. I’m hard-pressed to think of an example where having a mobile-only site on a mobile-specific domain is preferable to sniffing user agents.
Here’s where the potential downside of .mobi comes in. The biggest risk is that site owners will buy a .mobi domain, throw up an XHTML-MP site, and leave it at that, thinking they’ve got this mobile thing sorted out — after all, they’ve got a site using .mobi, that thing that’s supposed to make the mobile Web happen. But that strategy is really no better than putting up a WAP site a hard-to-find address. They’re both strategies that are more exclusionary than exclusive, leaving the hard work up to the end user, when it could better be done on the side of the site.
The bottom line for mobile Web surfing is that all users need to be delivered the information they want, regardless of their device or browser, or what address a content provider decides to use. Best case scenario, this means a mobile user goes to X.com, and gets served up a page formatted for their device. If that technology isn’t in place, they should get the standard HTML page, and their browser should be able to handle it. Adding another address possibility that users have to try really doesn’t do anything to help. .mobi has highlighted some best practices for the mobile Web, and site owners should take these into consideration. But they can (and should) be implemented separately from a .mobi address. Why introduce more confusion for users and pass it off as making things better for them?
(As an aside, if .mobi expects people to take their message of enhancing mobile usability and improving the experience of mobile Web users, they should start by improving their desktop site, which is laden with annoying and unnecessary PDFs and Word documents, and links opening in new browser windows.)
[tags]mobile, mtld, .mobi, mobi, domains, TLDs, mobile web, usability[/tags]
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[...] At Mobhappy Russell Buckley and Carlo Longino have some comments worth reading - in full here They put forward the argument that .mobi could actually be holding back the mobile web rather than kick-startingit… [...]
Very true.
Not sure browser or device sniffing should be promoted though. It’s a fundamentally flawed approach:
- I relies on websites providing the same content in multiple formats which potentially creates a lot of work for them. As a result non-mainstream formats, like mobile, will often be neglected or reduced compared to the “full” version.
- Some browsers certainly let you change the UA string (e.g.: desktop Opera) and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before some mobile browsers (or add on utilities / plugins) do the same. As a result sites can end up feeding devices incompatible or inferior content.
- Finally, the sniffing itself is a big maintenance job. It relies on webmasters keeping an up-to-date list of UA-strings. Since this is inpractical many probably rely on some kind of catch-all test like “if string contains ‘nokia’ feed it mobile version” which is a very blunt instrument. For example, I recently had a chance to test a new version of Nokia’s new S60 browsers which does a very good job of rendering full-on desktop page layouts on a mobile screen. When I visit news.bbc.co.uk though I get sent the stripped down mobile version rather than the (in this case) preferable desktop version.
Instead I think effort should have gone into promoting the use of handheld CSS stylesheets. The idea is you always serve up the same (X)HTML and use CSS for all the layout and styling. You can then link to multiple CSS files and indicate which ones should be used for which media (”screen” for PCs, “handheld” for phones/PDAs etc..). So you can give the same page completely different layouts suited to each kind of device.
Desktop browsers already ignore handheld stylesheets and some handheld browsers will use the handheld stylesheets when available. So this is a technique that can be used right now.
Admittedly many handheld browsers have limited CSS support and some don’t honour handheld stylesheets. But my point is if the .mobi people are going to make anything mandatory they should have focussed on this!
(sorry this got so long!
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Will dotMobi hold back the mobile web? We certainly don’t think so. Will dotMobi kick start the use of the mobile web? We certainly *do* think so! To be more correct, dotMobi provides — for the first time — an internet address that focuses on mobility and interoperability across networks and phones.
Could you in theory do the same thing with another domain name? The answer is yes, BUT other domain names cannot enforce standards for mobility in their license agreements and other domain names do not provide industry certification and open source coding libraries to developers for the mobile web. dotMobi does all of these things.
In fact, dotMobi works very closely with the W3C’s Mobile Web Initiative to make sure an open standards approach and best practices are followed. More and more product initiatives involving W3C and other relevant standards groups will be revealed in the coming year where dotMobi provides a valuable service to the mobile developer community — beyond just another domain name. This is why dotMobi is not just another internet address which by itself might confuse the community. dotMobi is an internet address with standards and software to make mobile work.
You could literally write a book on internet address and device detection capabilities with arguments for and against an internet address for the mobile phone. The facts are that the largest mobile competitors in the world came together to form dotMobi as their common platform for internet addressing and web identity. They must have had some common problem to solve that dotcom and other mobile technologies have not solved for the past 10 years.
I actually agree with many of the points in this post. I think the wrong attention is on dotMobi versus looking at how the industry solves the problem as a whole. dotMobi is one part of the solution that helps consumers easily find and use trustable mobile content from their phones. The other part of how the whole developer community does it in a common way must be addressed from many different perspectives. Fortunately, dotMobi will be providing some solutions that are free.
[...] I just read Carlo’s view on the launch of the .mobi registration opening for industries. I agree a lot with his opinion on this but I would like to add something. [...]
Dotmobi is a bad idea. There are many good people who are working on it, but either they have not thought through what they are doing (from a content provider perspective) or they are acting maliciously - which I doubt.
I wrote a letter to the editor of New Media Age a year ago just to make clear my views on the .mobi “top level domain”. Here it is:
.MOBI HAS NO CLOTHES
The “approval” of the .MOBI top level domain by ICANN is interesting but pointless. .MOBI is a red herring that will be consigned to the dustbin of irrelevant initiatives - like PL/1, Ada, Algol 68 and OSF/1. Here’s why:
Content Providers want to promote ONE “address” in written, electronic or verbal forms and want it to work through any medium - mobile, fixed or word of mouth. The technology exists to support this today. For example http://www.vodafone.com/ works well a PC or from a mobile phone.
The WWW Consortium advised ICANN to reject .MOBI early in 2004. Browser protocols provide an HTTP_ACCEPT header to a single URL to be used across all device types - hiding complexity from users. World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee warned that a new .MOBI domain could be harmful, potentially breaking the web’s device independence and putting mobile users in a walled garden.
The sponsors of the Irish company behind the “scheme” claim to want to provide a good user experience. It’s therefore amazing that after several years, most of their own web sites give an error message to hundreds of millions of mobile users. gsmworld.com, microsoft.com, sun.com, and even nokia.com all give an error message to most users because they only work on PC browsers.
If the .MOBI initiative gained any traction, it could complicate and confuse the Internet experience for mobile subscribers, and slow down the delivery of mobile services. Fortunately, enough people in the Mobile Content industry have pointed out the obvious flaws in the proposal, so few people will be embarrassed by praising the clothes of a naked emperor.
However, just in case its not absolutely clear, let me be like the little boy who spoke the truth: “.MOBI has no clothes! ” If any of the sponsors need help in developing their web sites to enable them to better support mobile devices, as Vodafone has already done, we are certainly more than willing to help provide them with the appropriate information.
Ray AndersonBango
P.S. The whole .mobi idea is also broken when it comes to “viral spread” of URL’s, push messages, search engines and bookmark sharing….
I don’t see how having one address which you can (as a user) guarantee delivers mobile-friendly content is more confusing than having several possible options, none of which can be guaranteed.
Yes, content providers *can* use HTTP ACCEPT headers or other means to redirect users appropriately - but many don’t, do they? And .mobi doesn’t stop them taking this approach (which is very sensible) as well.
To be the big win of .mobi is that it will get companies thinking about their mobile presence. Motivated in part by fear and need to protect brands and trademarks, they’ll need to ensure they own their .mobi domain - and to use it, they’ll need to put out some sort of mobile presence. So we benefit from a groundswell of new mobile content.
If companies start doing proper redirection from their main .com address and end-users get the idea that they can just type in “futureplatforms.com” to get to mobile content, then the work .mobi is doing will indeed be redundant. But I can’t see this happening across-the-board in the next couple of years.
MobHappy on .mobi…
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[...] For users, it’s pretty obvious — an Opera browser allows them to hit the sites their familiar with, at the usual address, “giving people what they want,” as von Tetzchner puts it. He sees no point in creating a mobile site a different, specific address, when users are already used to straightforward ones on the desktop (echoing my earlier comments about .mobi). [...]
dotMobi actually tries to address the need for more content on mobile devices but it doesn’t give a solution for the content provider community. They will still need to redesign and rewrite their content in WAP (2.0) and/or i-mode and/or new standards. Instead of having a new suffix (.mobi) today’s technologies can address this problem by simply identifying a mobile device that is trying to access a website, directing it to the mobile version automatically, so the user will type the same URL they are familiar with while being on the move.
Why reinvent the Web when Internet users are happy with the Web sites and services that already exist? Although WAP and i-mode exist, most of the Internet content including the top sites either don’t have a mobile version, do not work on mobile devices, or the results are very poor. And what about the multi-technology gaps that exist between mobile device manufacturers? Are we going back to a low common dominator concept or will all relevant players start to develop systems according to the same specifications? (I am sure that the answers are obvious). So did we miss something? Yes, it is the time and effort a content provider must put into the project in order to have a mobile version and that issue is not addressed by the dotMobi initiative.
The other issue remaining is the end-user habits and experience. Even if a content provider will write a mobile version, it will be different and will not include all the original web site offerings. The level of expectation from the end user perspective is not the same, it could even be perceived as a different site – a site the user is not familiar with.
The dotMobi concept is all about giving the end user a list of certified working sites available for mobile phones and standards behind the domain name, but what is the difference from the WAP 2.0 or i-mode standards? As I see it, users want the full web and dotMobi won’t be able to deliver it without heavy efforts from all sides (including the content providers). Therefore the issue should be solved from a different direction – for example, solutions which automatically adapt the original site to the mobile device’s physical and functional capabilities. This solution must provide the best content presentation and ease of use for even the smallest device. We need to provide users with what that they are really looking for – the World Wide Web!
Mobile-Only Domain Shows Its True Color: Green…
Backers of the .mobi mobile top-level domain insist that such a domain is “needed” so people know they…
Sniffing user-agent strings for mobile devices is trivial. Along with those strings (and more important than the string) devices display other ‘header’ information to the sites they browse which can inform exact display capabilities including encodings, screen size and other details. Therefor you don’t have to maintain anything other than the most basic heuristics to determine what to serve to a particular device.
The .mobi domain is confusing for consumers and not helpful to companies. I wish it would go away.
The whole concept of the internet is that it doesn’t matter if the person is using a 100-pixel mobile device, or a 4000-pixel NASA supercomputer, or a TV, or an in-car system that reads to them out loud. They simply want to access the site (well, in fact, that’s not true, they simply want the information that the site contains).
As mentioned above, Tim Berners-Lee warned against the domain, and I agree- Sniffing the browser with endless branching is so last millennium, and should be discouraged in favor of handheld CSS. Having to remember what extension to use (.com/.co.uk/.org/.net/.mobi etc) is only part of the trouble. Screen size is another factor, but it isn’t the only one, and in one of the examples I gave above, it doesn’t matter. You also have to consider bandwidth, software compatibility, processing power and so on. There are far too many factors to worry about, without something extra and trivial like this.
Besides, what happens when you buy a mobile phone in 2011 that has a 50GHz processor and a 3D screen? Will we still have to be tied to this tld?
If everybody used the tld that suited their company, then things would be a lot easier. Personally, I don’t even like it when every organisation uses .com without thinking about it. I guess I’m just a purist…
[...] It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of .mobi. I haven’t had much to add since I posted on it back in May, so I’ve avoided writing about it here. But the mobile-specific domain’s administrators have done a couple things recently I want to draw attention to. [...]
More Ruminations on .mobi and Ajax…
If you’re like me, you probably tuned out all of the marketing hype around the launch of the .mobi TLD. Technorati : .mobi, ajax, mobile…
Hey guys .. im really a rookie .. and im on no assignment here .. but what i thought i need to determine, is the flipside of .mobi .. as a TLD .. in it self .. i guess it doesnt really target a specific niche of audience .. and on the one hand it is purely a platform or interface oriented model ..
what im really concernd is abt why and how ICANN gave .mobi’s introduction a nod ..
.mobi im sure most of u are aware , is backed by thirteen major companies including Ericsson, GSM Association, Google, Hutchison, Microsoft, Nokia, Orascom Telecom, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse, Telefonica Moviles, TIM (Telecom Italia), T-Mobile and Vodaphone,
All these Corporations are Massive in their own sense .. But are they really focussed on making the internet a more enriching experience .. or is it just that .. they know that a merger of this magnitude is a sign of the rise of a New Monopoly .. ?
I mean .. In the case of Most Sponsored TLD’s .. it is a merger of organizations which have specific interest in the growth of the sector that they are responsible for.. eg .travel…
but what is ICANNS agenda here .. ?? do they soon want a parallel internet .. ..i mean i agree that the total domain name usage today is approximately 65 million . .but .mobi is a sophisticated technique of gaining an edge over most of the Gtlds … given the solid support .. and a targett audience 4times that of all the other CCTLD’s AND GTLD’s in existance ..
where is the MTLD .. headed .. ??
Help Me with the answers
[...] I also love using this A number of new top-level domains have been introduced over the past few years, like .jobs, .travel and .eu, but unsurprisingly, they haven’t been particularly popular, except with domain squatters. Registrars and companies that promote new TLDs feed on this, knowing that most big companies will simply go out and buy up domain names containing their names and trademarks of any new TLD, not because they have any interest in using them, but just to keep them out of the hands of squatters and to avoid getting into disputes over ownership, or having to buy them back at inflated prices later. It’s been pretty clear from the outset that one such new TLD, .mobi, intended for web sites aimed at users on mobile devices, has been about little more than the money, despite the protestations of the company behind it. Everything the company has done is geared towards wringing as much money out of the process as possible: .mobi domains carry a higher cost than many other domains, supposedly to cut down on cybersquatting; registrations of trademarks made during the “sunrise” period carried an even greater cost; the company held back 5,000 common words and phrases it will auction off, saying that will ensure a fairer distribution than a first-come, first-served policy and not mentioning it will maximize revenue (while saying it’s not a money-grab because they could have held even more names back); putting out a call for advisors on the mobile web, but only if they can pay. But the truth remains that .mobi really does nothing to advance the mobile internet, and all it does is compel companies to snap up more domains they don’t need and don’t really want. [...]