As you may have heard, .mobi domains have started to be distributed. But, the heated discussion has not settled down. Indeed, I see the complaints and warnings outnumbering the positive messages. And for the most part, the only positive messages have come from folks directly involved with .mobi.
That’s not too promising. Sounds like a marketing exercise on the order of so many initiatives that were born in 2000 and 2001 (I was there, I remember).
Carlo, at MobHappy (link below), posted* a good piece that has generated some great comments. Reading the comments, I was able to finally wrap my head around this and put it in perspective. Indeed, Tom Hume, the last comment I saw, pulls us back to see some of the simple benefits of .mobi, though not necessarily the main benefits the .mobi gang might be pushing (see quote below).
So, this is the thought that is forming in my head:
.mobi is a ghetto of a sort, causing a squatters rush of domain buyers. That’s a nasty comment, but I see .mobi at odds with the direction everyone else has been trying to go. But, here’s the silver lining, due to the stipulations of domain ownership, these buyers, as Tom points out, will have to create some sort of mobile site. That’s good, in the sense that it will get these domain owners to deal with mobile version of their site. I think that’s a bit of a backhanded compliment, but the intent can have interesting consequences.
Now, let’s pull back a bit more.
I like to view things as continuums. Adding a thought I got from Christian Lindholm, I think we’re going to have all sorts of combinations out there – unchanged sites, sites with separate mobile versions, sites that sniff the user agent and re-do the layout via CSS, multiple sites being viewed via a transcoder (sorry, Scott and Dave), and, with .mobi, special mobile sites. I don’t think .mobi will ever be the only way to serve mobile sites, I don’t think they will dominate ever, I don’t think we will ever have a simple way to tackle this.
On the flip side, what I do think will happen is that, as the mobile replaces the PC as the main channel to access Web info, basic market forces will help us find 1) the best ways to provide Web info to phones, 2) drive businesses to no longer treat their mobile site as a second-class citizen. My prediction is that, in the end, it will not be about browsing, which is where I think most of the discussion is right now, but in making the Web mobile-savvy, fusing the Web with the Mobile Lifestyle (you knew I’d say that, right?).
What do you think? Can we stop wasting brain cycles debating .mobi, relegate it to being just one (albeit minor) way of mobilizing websites, and realize that there are other ways for us to drive the market to mobilize the Web? Can we all wake up and realize that it is not about browsing, that special domain names or fancy browsers are not the answer to mobilizing the Web, that it is deeper than that?
What do you think?
.mobi — Kickstarting the Mobile Web, Or Holding It Back? at MobHappy
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.
*Hey, and I know Carlo’s post was a while ago. The bigger the topic, sometimes the slower I am to craft a response. 🙂 Also, I’ve been falling behind on my feeds and emails, so appy-polly-logies to all affected.
The problem with .MOBI is that it breaks with the current structure of the Internet by “partitioning” it and forcing a tighter relationship between the client and the server.
I wrote a blog on this at http://petercranstone.blogspot.com/2006/05/how-web-works-how-that-conflicts-with.html
You might find it worth a read.
All the best,
Peter
I’m not sure we’ve made ourselves clear on our transcoder objections:
1. They are blatantly illegal. Few of the sites being transcoded have the special copyright provisions posted to allow derivatives. That’s what trancoders do, they pick and choose between site content and layout elements, creating a derivative web site.
2. They promote censorship. If a publisher has ignoring mobile-specific or even phone-specific versions of sites, they are completely ignored.
3. They consolidate power and hurt innovation. Google is using their monopoly-scale search market share to set de facto mobile publishing standards. You live in Europe and saw the EU sue Microsoft over Windows Media Player bundling from close up. This is the same issue and will follow the same path — IF we’re lucky.
Dot-mobi is exactly in-line with the transcoder push. The search engines are seeking to “embrace and extend” into controlling publishing standards by ignoring mobile versions of web sites, which saves them a ton of money and gives them even more power. Dot-mobi, crappy a concept as it is, will be the one place they know not to transcode. At the rate things are going, they may choose to trancode dot-mobi sites anyway.