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.Mobi Could Spur Wireless Web
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Microsoft, Google, Vodafone, Nokia and several other companies are backing .mobi, a new top-level domain aimed at making it easier to browse the Web on mobile devices, such as cellphones and PDAs, the Wall Street Journal reports. On Monday, Mobile Top Level Domain opened registration. 'In a matter of hours, thousands of websites were signed up, including Yahoo.mobi and Hotjobs.mobi. For now, registration for dot-mobi Web sites is open only to members of wireless industry trade associations, which include wireless carriers, handset manufacturers and media companies, including Yahoo Inc., that want to make money from providing content to the wireless Web.' Registrants have to follow certain rules to get the domain, including that sites cannot 'cause pop-ups or other windows to appear.'"
Given the generally awful text input systems on mobile devices, why create a TLD that is four characters long? It's still easier to type .com!
So where is the tie in with the RIAA, Gwen Stefani and music videos?
That's the last think I need... as if talking on my cell phone wasn't bad enough while driving.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
Why forgo the 'l'?
With the plethora of wireless devices now having some wireless 'web' capability, some have Java browsers, some with WAP browsers... a single .mobi TLD won't fix all the problems. The real problem is a lack of standard practices for wireless browsers. There are some sites that work well today, formatted for small screens... many don't.
.xxx) won't fix the problems... but its a good start IMO
Just saying it will fix things (remember
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Brilliant. They decided to register a *four letter TLD* specifically for applications with a stupidly slow data entry rate...
twitter.com/gravitronic
Could I trademark a name now and go register it?
Why do we have tlds at all. They are ignored anyway. Seems to me this is just another way to scam money.
If the server and client side are both by-invitation-only, isn't this little more than a multi-vendor closed system, rather than an actual part of the internet?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
As has been said it was stupid to make a four letter TLD for a mobil device. The smartest thing to have done would be to make it something easy to type out on a phone keypad. Something like .adg (just hit 1,2,3) or .ptw (7,8,9). Sure they're not catchy but they would be very quick to type out on a cell phone.
I thought this was taken care of with sites like Google for Mobiles. But interesting none the less.
"Given the generally awful text input systems on mobile devices, why create a TLD that is four characters long? It's still easier to type .com!"
.com in browsers. So it's not a big step to having mobile browsers defaulting to the new TLD.
You don't have to type
Wow, a TLD that discourages stupid ads and pop-ups and gratuitous Flash animations. Hell, what's to stop people on regular computer browsers from abandoning the old home pages for these new non-crappified sites?
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
New TLDs really serve no purpose other than to enrich the organizations managing them. They don't expand the namespace in a meaningful way - even if you had the financial means to do so you couldn't register Yahoo.mobi or Yahoo.US or Yahoo.biz. So any trademarked term is already ruled out. That said, the pricing for common words is usually enormous - does anyone think they'll be able to purchase sex.mobi for the standard $9/year (or whatever it is)? So now common words are out. If you can't get common or popular words, why bother using .mobi at all when you'd have to come up with a name just as distinctive as if you'd registered a .com?
.com, making it even less useful for its intended task - being used on mobile devices - than .com.
Frankly the only reason I can see for creating new TLDs is to force trademark holders to buy their trademarked terms defensively - that's probably a guaranteed instant 100k registrations. The whole thing just seems like a scam. If they'd at least gone with ".m" rather than ".mobi" then they could play the "simpler to type" angle, but ".mobi" is even longer than
rooooar
Interestingly enough, there actually is an entry in the DNS hierarchy for mobi. However, if I'm interpreting the serial properly, it's in the future.
mobi. 86342 IN SOA tld1.ultradns.net. info.afilias.net. 2006053119 10800 3600 2592000 86400
DNS serial numbers are entirely a matter of semantics. The only requirement is that they increase when you change things in the zone [which is what the last two digits of their serial are for, presumably].
I've never seen a situation such as this. Any DNS gurus want to enlighten me as to why someone would want to do this? Just sort of an indicator of ``don't use this yet''?
Whoever came up with this should be shot. Seriously. Either use the DNS the way it is designed, or open it up and let everyone make stuff up.
:(((
yahoo.mobi? Idiots who fell for a salesguy with even less brains, and neither of them understand what a hierarchy is supposed to be for.
mobi.yahoo.com - now, was that so difficult? Google gets it - it's "maps.google.com" and not "google.maps". And that's exactly the way the DNS hierarchy is supposed to work - go from the most general towards the more specific. TLD: Generic type, domain name: Owner/Company, subdomain: Purpose.
Ah well, I guess it's too late anyways. Idiots have been running ICANN for years, it was only a matter of time until they fuck up completely. I'm sure this'll go through.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If they're going to break convention and not use a three letter TLD, why not avoid the eccentric abbreviation and just call it .mobile?
This sort of crap reminds of when I read people's code and they name variables things like "condvar". Just use the real name or use a clear abbreviation. Would ".mbl" have been that freakin difficult for the average person to decipher?
*blinking cursor*
I thought web browsers and web servers were suppose to take care of this without having a separate address.
For example, if a cell phones does an http GET from www.cnn.com, the cell phone sends a header stating that it is a mobile device, the server then adjusts to content to make it appropiate for the cell phone. Is this right?
Also, why the hell are they making a separate registry for this? It is just a different protocall and the internet was designed so different registries were not needed for different protocalls. Shouldn't it be:
mobi.cnn.com
Instead of www.cnn.mobi
That is what is done with other protocalls such as ftp, etc. Thats why you see 'ftp.yoursite.com' instead of 'www.yoursite.ftp'. Whats next a different registry for every device/protocall combination?
Only thing it'll spur is another "landgrab" fiasco where thousands of cybersquatters trip over themselves in a hurry to register all .mobi domains they could think of and fill them with google ads.
Isn't this what the "handheld" CSS media type is for?
"Religion is the most malevolent of all mind viruses." - Arthur C. Clarke.
Many pages are designed to use different variables depending on which browser you use. If we can tell which browser is being used, why cannot mobile specific browsers broadcast that they are from a phone, so that the mobile content can be displayed in lieu of the regular? Seems like it would be much easier...
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.-TJ
Ok,
Why not simply mobi.yahoo.com instead of yahoo.mobi (and a similar pattern for all other domains)???
This is something which in my mind could easily be done with subdomains, and I see no benefit from creating another TLD.
If the excuse is that you will type fewer characters on your mobile phone to get to these domains, it's lame, because as soon as all the short names are taken people will start registering longer names. Besides, new input devices will eventually be released for small devices, rendering this excuse useless.
Also, for how long do they think that mobile devices will remain a niche market? Don't they realize that everything (PCs, laptops, PDAs, cellphones, cameras, mp3 players, etc) is converging into universal devices? The PCs of today will be the mobile devices of tomorrow, so it's preposturous to create a new TLD just for them.
- eyefish
Maybe .mobi could spur the wireless web... If it weren't for the fact that any content provider could already do the exact same thing today, without needing the new TLD. If they cared, which damned few seem to do. You don't need a fancy new domain to publish a clean, uncluttered, page without tons of flash and javascript. If sites wanted to do that they would. But they don't, so they won't, and a new TLD won't change that.
Sounds like WAP re-born. No one supported that, either.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
The MOBI name is currently trademarked in the US by Route1 Inc., a Canadian corporation. See the USPTO listing at http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=7 uj6cr.2.7/.
Since this trademark is directly related to computer networking and electronic messaging, Route 1 might be none to happy.
How about this instead.
mobi.yourdomain.(com|net|org|co.uk|.etc...)
And you don't have to wait!
Oh never mind that wouldn't create another top level domain someone could make money on.
I do feel that every .mobi domain should be required to have a theme song. They would able to choose from the wide variety of Moby songs currently avaible for human use. This would certainly make .mobi domain more popular. I mean, who doesn't want to "shake their booty" while surfing the web.
023AD01("Child", "Evil");
"Why do we need yet another TLD that needs to be registered and maintained when we can today go to mobi.slashdot.org and get a slightly different page? Why can't we just use CSS's @media handheld?"
Horse and Buggy should be good enough for everyone.
no moby jokes yet?!?!?
.cig
I knew someone would finally come up with this technological breakthrough that allows "The Mobile Web" to finally take off. Its not better screens, useable input devices, durable equipment with long battery life and low cost, cheap available bandwidth, or security end users can be confident in. No. None of these. The missing key has been the .mobi top level domain. Now, we can all get down to the business of using it and making money.
1. Invent the internet.
2. Create wireless Phones.
3. Convince end users that the internet is the web
4. Sell devices that can connect to the internet
5. Wait around for a dozen years.
6. Create a '.mobi' top level domain
7. Profit!
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Are you kidding? It's a conspiracy!! That 4th character is more data the mobile carriers can charge for using! If it were up to them the TLD would be .mobilenowonderwechargesomuchforunlimitedrateplans whydidntwethinkofthisearlier.
a massive, industry-wide kludge for targeting the devices at the presentation tier.
illegitimii non ingravare
I want my own TLD.
I like the idea with pop-ups disallowed, this should make way to other top-level domains as well. Unlimited pop-ups *grin* should be allowed only for .xxx tld if that happens in future ;-)
Pixel image editor - http://www.kanzelsberger.com
This is just going to make those mobile users bigger pains in the ass; not looking where they're going, talking loudly into their VOIP devices, and getting angry cuz they can't figure out their email while they're driving.
.mobi dicks...
Freakin
Back in the day they just picked different ports and delegated subdomains to designate such things (ie: www, gopher, ftp)... when did this stop working?
I've got an even better one for you, it's called "about:blank". Then just use the little searchy-box thingy in the upper right-hand corner of your browser. You can even configure said searchy-box so that it uses your choice of engine.
That's assuming of course that you're using a browser that doesn't suck.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Why do we need yet another TLD that needs to be registered and maintained when we can today go to mobi.slashdot.org and get a slightly different page?
Because nobody will do it, if it is simply some voluntary suggestion to use a subdomain standard. There would also be no way to enforce standards on a subdomain.
Just because a solution may seem logical doesn't make it marketable. It would be impossible to get people to standardize to something like .adg on a mobile phone. Its a lot easier to make mobile phone browsers to default to .mobi when no tltd is used.
"There are some sites that work well today, formatted for small screens... many don't."
It's a scaling-relevency issue. While going from one size screen to another with different characteristics. What do you add? What do you take out? Maybe adopting hinting (like fonts) would help?
What does http://www.google.mobi/ get you?
Why, it's a redirect to:
http://www.google.com/mobile/
BRILLIANT!
Meh.
Beyond the .com, .org, .net and .edu TLDs, and possibly the CC-TLDs, I have probably used the new TLDs about less than 0.5% of the time. All the other, while being cute and all don't seem to have the same popularity and people still clamour for one of the orginal three. No sane company uses .biz, the .info is usually the last place I look for an information site. For example I know that Montreal's (QC, Canada) transport service uses a .info domain, but I would have more expected to be under the .qc.ca domain.
My general conclusion is that all too often these new domains are created by commities without a real sense of the psychology of the people who may or may not use these domains.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
is .tv a country of the glow tube?
How about .info?
Sorry just because the most common domains use 3 letters doesn't mean it is a convention.
Granted I don't get mobi either. First thought it was about motherboards. .go perhaps?
Ah fuck it, dns is for kids anyway, real men surf by IP.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
by Moby of course. Come to think of it, it'd make one hell of a ringtone...
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
I thought all he could do was write overhyped electronic music.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
full support for css is much mor eimportant. i started working on an app for a friend and gave up b/c i had to use tables and style each table row separately. i might've had to style each data section, too - can't remember.
i quite b/c of that crap.
4. Sell devices that can connect to the internet
.mobi would mean such operators could easily open up all access to .mobi in some confidence that it's going to be just fine (no support calls etc.), and I guess they're hoping that people will rush to make their sites .mobi for that audience.
.mobi is pretty pointless. It makes me think it's all part of the mobile operator's constant "keep it fresh" marketing plans, ever since they all paid far too much for 3G.
Here in the UK, some mobile operators offer "the internet", which is actually "selected sites". On the face of it, this looks like the ops are trying to control the Internet/make money out of sites wanting to be on their network. However, I suspect at least part of the motivation is to only allow access to sites without popups, flash etc, so that even though you can't visit yourfavouritesite.com, at least what you can get to works okay.
However, as a poster above pointed out, there is convergence going on - that is, the WAP of yesterday is "mini browsers" today, so it's not going to be long before
I use my cellphone for sending SMS [gasp] and as a mobile telephone [double gasp]!
I don't want to use my mobile phone as mp3 player, or movie station.....
Don't act surprised if your
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
I agree with the comment about .mobi vs. .mob but I don't browse the internet using my cell phone enough to care. .Com still works for me.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
"The Mobile Web" to finally take off.
I don't want it to take off - and I doubt it will anytime soon. I'll get back to you on "why is that?" in a moment.
Its not better screens
Define better?
A lot of the screens on current cellphones are color - be it 4096 colors, of 16bit color - how many more colors do you need to enjoy the web? Now if you were editing a 4k film plate on your mobile version of Shake.. okay.
Do you mean size, then? Well, get a PDA instead. But wait, then you have a big device, instead of the tiny but status-symbol that e.g. a RAZR is made out to be. Guess what, until those rollup screens come out and make us all a communicator a la that in Earth:Final Conflict - or they create a supertiny projector (and then you need to have a surface to project on all the time...), large screen = large device.
What else is wrong with current screens then? Resolution? Sure.. most cellphones are horrible in that regard.. PDAs are QVGA or VGA, some mobile devices are 1024x768. The latter two can quite comfortably display most websites, and even QVGA devices do well with on-the-fly rescaling, or changing the layout. Lack of CSS and full javascript support is doing more to hurt the experience than the screen size.
useable input devicesp
Ditto to above. Yes, cellular phones obviously have limited keys.. for a reason; a full keyboard takes up more space. If you want a full keyboard, you can get one of the many PDAs that have one; and then you may complain about the keyboard still being too tiny, but you can always get a bluetooth (mini) keyboard and use that - but then you need to haul that around. So again, if you want a big(ger) keyboard, you'll have to settle for a big(ger) device for now.
Alternative to implementing a full hardware keyboard is to implement a software keyboard on a touch screen; again.. see PDA.
durable equipment
You'll have to define durable; my old cell phone has been living for 6 years now... the only reason others around me have replaced theirs within 1.5-2 years is because they 'needed' to have a new one (read: shinier, smallers, cuter, status symbol, etc.). Admittedly, so did I - I upgraded to a PocketPC phone, but mostly because I needed to be able to have wireless internet access, and my old cellular phone had only limited internet access through a provider portal; will get back on that one as well.
with long battery life
Same issue here.. unless you plan to be online surfing the web 24/7, your battery will easily last 3 or more days on a PocketPC. Even longer on a cellphone (there's simply less hardware to power). Anywhere in those days, you can easily charge your device again overnight - if you can't, then I suspect you'll have more pressing issues to deal with than lack of (comfortable) mobile web access...
and low cost, cheap available bandwidth
That is an issue. T-Mobile seems to be doing OK with their flat-fee, but it's still about as expensive as a full broadband internet connection. But if you need it - it's not a bad deal.. beats e.g. $3/MB (or part thereof)
or security end users can be confident in
Not sure what you mean by that one... did your mobile device get a virus lately? Some hacker got root on it?
I know there has been some viruses that spread via Bluetooth, and I'm sure this will increase as the various mobile operating systems become more powerful, but I don't see that as a big issue currently.
Now back to why I don't want a mobile web to take off per se: We have a web, and it works. We have portable devices that become more powerful all the time. In the foreseeable future, devices will quite easily display existing web content, and let the user interact with it. So why do we want a separate 'mobile' web?
Of course there will always be some devices, such as small cellphones, which would simply not work with existing web content due to their small screen sizes/input limitations, etc. But would those who want full web access r
Given that I can register any .org, .com, or .net name I want, there really is no point anymore. It used to be that a .org indicated some kind of non-commercial organizationg, but there is nothing to stop a company from branding its web presence as widget.org as opposed to widget.com.
.com, and most webservers will redirect you to the proper canonical name.
.org or .net version, but that is trivial.
For that matter, why do we even use a "www" in the hostname. In general use, people refer to websites using as the domain name as in "I got it at thinkgeek.com" or "it's at digg.com". Even more frequently, the common parlance these days is to omit even the ".com" as it is assumed as in "I found it on ebay" or "go to jibjab". Most decent browsers will assume the
Aside from legacy issues, a relatively simple change to the DNS structure could do away with TLDs, having a response to indicate that the given "domain" is not unique for legacy names. Of course, what happens when I want to register a name that is already taken? In the past, if I didn't care, I could take the
Too bad we can't have a plain old open architecture system. Imagine if tcp/ip had never caught on, instead of flaming on slashdot we'd all be downloading screensavers from aol and compuserve.
Why create new sub-web when it already starts becoming obsolete?
Look at mobile web browsers like Opera/Opera Mini - you can access most dotcoms from it today. Minimo is coming. Nokias WebKit is coming. Adobe/Macromedia is working on mobile version of Flash.
Soon after all registrars earn their money, .mobi will be useless (everyone will pay their mobi-tax and point domain to .com version with handheld stylesheets).
I generally don't like all the new TLDs that tends to be created nowdays. .mobi-domain actually make sense, becase domain owners are required to comply .mobi Styleguide.
.mobi domain is more or less guaranteed to work on a mobile device. Sure, todays mobile devices have great web capabilities but they will never come close
c h%20On!%20Web%20Browsing%20Style%20Guide.pdf
However, the
with the
Yes, that means content under the
to a normal computer when it comes to screen resolution.
The styleguide is avaiable at http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/
There is also a PDF avaiable at http://pc.mtld.mobi/documents/dotmobi%20--%20Swit
The internet wasn't meant for cellphones!
A simple .m would suffice.
.arpa before... :)
.arpa, whether they realize it or not...
There's NO reason why TLDs have to be TLAs. In theory, they can be any length (although some dumb application coders don't realize this and think they "must" be 2-3 chars long, as if they'd never heard of
And yes, people DO still use
http://pc.mtld.mobi/whois/index.php
try searching for nic.mobi, you'll see this:
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
Exactly as huge as the .com database.
.org, and not for .com? Especially considering typosquatters will frequently troll TLDs for domains to register at other TLDs?
.com. Now explain to me how having a root DNS server that knows where the .com servers are is any better than just taking the .com servers and making them root DNS servers?
.com servers, and there are fewer .com servers than .com names, thus there are more root DNS servers than .com servers?
Well, slightly bigger, but how many domains are there that only exist for (say)
Assume for a moment that there was nothing except
Or is this about the way it's coded? That the root DNS servers can list multiple
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It's interesting that since I've been browsing this story google has started indexing .mobi sites:
http://kibosig.googlepages.com/googlemobisearch.ht m
P2P Anonymous Distributed Web Search: http://www.yacy.net/
I'm just waiting for the .crap domain.
M and O are both on the 6 key. This means that the user has to hit the key once to enter M, then wait or press some other key, before they can press 6 three times more to get the O.
.com addresses. Which idiot thought it would be a good idea to make the same mistake again?
This is already a problem with all
It's starting to sound a little redundant. I think that this would be even more useless than .xxx, mainly because of the fact that most mobile devices are not going to be so limited as current mobile devices are. Who are the most ravenous supporters of these domains? Who stands to benefit the most?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mobi/
I expect a lot of edits from you, Slashdot!
Don't let me down!
When mad at one, try running a mile in their shoes. That way, not only do you have their shoes, but you are a mile away.
Well I hate to break it to all you negative thinkers out there but dotMOBI has taken off exceptionaly well. There were no major issues with the launch. Also note that there are more than 40 registrars already and that is only with sunrise on the go. When the puplic landrush begins you better hope you get your domain name fast or it will be gone. To bad all you people slandering this TLD don't have a clue which direction IT is going or you would think this is a wonderfull start.
well, if they can rehash old stuff, i'll do it, too.
It saves like, uhm, two keystrokes or something...
That's a quantum leap in efficiency...uhm...
First of all, a top level domain for phones? Huh? Let me see something, if you want a top level domain for phones, why didn't the mobile phone providers jsut collaborate and setup their own top level domain accessible only from phones? They just need to add a record to their DNS servers to support it. Did they need an ICANN supported domain so that desktop users can see the mobile content also?
.mobi is intended to host pages that are formatted for telephones. So in reality, sites are now forced to setup another domain to host their pages that are formated for phones... huh? If they're going to actually host a .mobi domain, why not just send a different CSS to the phone to format the existing page? I mean, there's no reason that they can't just support the same stuff on their .com/.org/.etc
.mobi is a waste... maybe this is a good alternative to .XXX after all, most of what I've read says that the porn by phone industry is BOOMING... maybe .mobi should be dedicated to .XXX content instead.
Next...
Opera and Netfront (not so well on Netfront) support small screen rendering of normal pages. It's not as nice as seeing a page designed for a mobile phone, but really, it's more than sufficient. Why make a new page format when SSR works relatively well.
Oh we were talking about Nokia... right the guys porting Konquerer/Safari to mobile phones. Well, they've done a decent job so far, but in time they will also have a form of SSR. For the moment, they have a rather unique approach to handling it.
What, not all phones have SSR? Get Opera Mini, runs on any phone with Java. Then a big stinking server run by Opera scales the page content before hand, prerenders it and delivers it to the phone. Works on pretty much every phone and costs the user MUCH less if they're paying for bandwidth.
So really, if you think about it,
I think you get the idea.
This may come as a shocking revelation to you, but you aren't everyone. When I'm stuck at the doctor's office waiting for my appointment, or when my wife is hogging the downstairs computer and I'm too lazy to go find another one, or my cable modem service is down, or when I'm on the road and I want me some Mapquest directions... I want to be able to read web pages on my phone.
This doesn't mean that I think a ".mobi" domain is a great idea - for lots of reasons covered elsewhere in this discussion, I think it's dumb. But just because you don't personally want to read web pages on your phone doesn't mean it shouldn't be possible.
Sean