I was out with my sister, having lunch at the Olive Garden, not too long ago. It had been at least a few hours (heaven forbid) since either of us had been in front of a television or a computer. It seemed like the food was taking forever to get to our table. We were in the middle of conversation when she suddenly asked, “The Red Sox game is on now, do you know what the score is?”. Being the guy I am, I took out my cell phone and loaded up the Red Sox homepage (redsox.com). What I found was a mess.
Taking an aim to create an internet-wide standard to fix this mobile computing problem is the top-level domain name, .mobi. .mobi has gained approval from ICANN since it originally submitted its sTLD application on March 19, 2004. This new mobile TLD is sponsored by Nokia, Vodafone, Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Ericcson, who came together to form the organization “mTLD”.
The .mobi top level domain will have three distinguished registration periods. Starting May 22, 2006, a “Limited Industry Sunrise” will commence, enabling those in the mobile and mobile computing industries to register their trademark domain names under .mobi. This mobile industry has been pre-defined by mTLD.
Then starting June 12, 2006, comes a Trademark Sunrise period where trademark holders can register their trademark name under the .mobi extension. This trademark registration period run for 70 days until August 21, 2006 to protect the names and assets of trademark holders.
After a brief trademark review period, general registrations will begin on August 28, 2006. General registrations will be open to everyone. Whichever registration group you fall within, you’re probably asking yourself:
Why should I care about .mobi?
First off, I have a question for you? Do you have an internet-capable mobile device? Chances are, if you do, you already understand how websites load inside your mobile browser. Depending on your mobile device and browsing software, rendering and height/width problems occur, among others. The goal that I seeing coming out of .mobi is to set standards within a light-weight but scaleable mobile internet network.
But many people say that .mobi does not warrant its top level extension, due to the fact that the extension is based on a device-centric concept, rather than that of an industry. Almost two years ago in May of 2004, the creator of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, spoke to an audience of over five hundred people from more than forty countries about domain name extensions.
At that time, the application for .mobi had just been submitted. Berners-Lee spoke of furthering the internet with new possibilities with new extensions, but spoke negatively about .mobi.
It would be great if new domains were opened, but ones with social or technology context that make a commitment to the social system and to the integrity of that piece of the Web.
Less than a month later, he wrote a paper to further his point he addressed to the crowd. In his paper, he emphasized a two major problems with the new .mobi extension.
Device Independence
Berners-Lee claims (citing his own book), Weaving the Web, that the internet was specifically designed to operate independently of the hardware, software and networks used to access it. He claims that .mobi would break these rules, applying a top level extension aimed only at mobile devices.
Loss of Web Functionality
Berners-Lee also states that by introducing a new domain name extension based on mobile technology would imply that other domain extension were inadequate for mobile technology.
Although Berners-Lee created the internet and its basic rules and guidelines nearly fifteen years ago, nearly even minute since then, the internet and the devices used to access it have been in constant evolution.
And with evolution comes change. The concept behind the .mobi extension provides a wide array of possibilities for mobile websites and mobile web applications.
Some sites in the .mobi extension have already been launched to showcase the ability of the .mobi extension. A sampling is below (please take note that these sites are made for mobile devices):
- http://www.afilias.mobi/
- http://www.syniverse.mobi/mobi/
- http://www.weather.mobi
- http://www.vodafone.mobi
- http://www.tim.mobi
- http://www.t-mobile.mobi/
However successful .mobi is, the concept behind .mobi is a change for the better.
7 comments
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April 28th, 2006 at 5:40 pm
Dan
However, the need for addressing separate mobile-oriented Web sites, to the extent this is required (although mobile devices are gradually increasing in capabilities and hence ability to access more normal sites if they are implemented in a standards-compatible, platform-neutral manner), can be met through other means than a separate TLD. For instance, one could use a standardized subdomain or hostname, like “wap.example.org” for the WAP-compatible site of the organization whose regular site is at “www.example.org”. Or, even more elegantly, one could take advantage of the existing capability of HTTP format negotiation and serve a mobile-compatible site in a language such as WML to browsers that indicate a preference for it, from the same URL as the normal HTML document is served to browsers preferring that.
Anyway, several of the links you provided were inactive when I tried them.
April 28th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
Steve Castle
I agree with your subdomain argument to an extent, but I believe that to provide a solid ground and strive for mobile compatibility, the right direction is .mobi. I talked about Tim Berners-Lee in the article because this is one of the first times that I disagree with what he has to say regarding internet naming infrastructure.
I believe that a device-specific extension will promote mobile internet and communication. As for WML (and my very limited interaction with it), I believe that it is outdated, not from a language standpoint (since its markup is similar to XML), but from a mobile browser acceptance standpoint. Browsers are getting more and more intricate, and are able to go beyond the reaches of WML’s capability.
As for the links:
When I wrote the article earlier today, all of those links were active. Since then they have gone done, and I have removed the dead ones. Thanks for reporting that.
-Steve
April 30th, 2006 at 7:00 am
Abhinav Sharma
I think .mobi is a good idea, but knowing that it was to be accessed by mobile devices, they should have used a TLD that can be typed easily by mobile devices.
April 30th, 2006 at 11:05 am
Steve Castle
I understand where you’re coming from with typing on mobile devices. My mobile OS is Windows Mobile, on SprintNextel i930 manufactured by Motorola. I don’t know about other phones that support it, but I have T9 Predictive text (T9 Website) and it works wonders. If you visit a common set of websites, no matter how they are spelled, spellings of those websites can be entered into T9’s database, so it will recognize what you’re trying to type.
I’ve found it very useful so far. But I do understand that mobile phones that do not have a feature like this are going to have to press a lot of numbers to get to the sites that they want to see on the run.
But we’ve come a long way with mobile devices and technology in general. Soon, a heavy percentage of phones will support T9 or a T9-like functonality.
May 26th, 2006 at 7:08 am
kL
Haha. redsox.com works fine in Opera browser
http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/operamini/demo.dml
I’m really disgusted by the fact that entire TLD is created becaus of bugs in Pocket IE.
What’s next? Steal TLD from Ireland? ;>
May 26th, 2006 at 8:58 am
Steve Castle
Honestly, the concept behind the TLD isn’t necessarily pointing a guilty finger at pocketIE, but the current mobile browsing experience in general. The fact that redsox.com (good choice by the way, you picked the right team,
) works in your browser isn’t what .mobi is trying to do. Its trying to make the mobile browsing even easier - smaller pages, easier navigation, and so on.
I’ve read much commentary that opposes .mobi. Some of the people have used mobile devices for browsing the internet, but to my knowledge, many of them haven’t. To encourage conversation, I posted a response to an article written on Obvuious Diversion about opposition to .mobi. The author, Christian, has used mobile devices and believes that mobile version of applications should be “fixed” into the original version.
As for .ie, I don’t see it happening
Cheers!
May 31st, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Ray Anderson
Speaking as a heavy user of mobile internet, I’d like to say that 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.
Redsox.com should detect your device and serve a smaller site for smaller screen devices.
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 Anderson
For some good examples of mobile sites see www.bbc.co.uk , www.aol.com, www.bango.net/oasis, www.google.com etc etc
P.S.
See also: http://www.w3.org/2004/07/dotmobi_diwg.html
and
http://forum.icann.org/lists/stld-rfp-mobi/msg00017.html