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.Mobi Could Spur Wireless Web

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the little-tiny-slash-comments dept.

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.'"

8 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. Odd length by adamwright · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

  2. When can you get one? by Douglas+Simmons · · Score: 3, Interesting
    From the article: "Companies with trademark-validated names will be able to register in June for 70 days to avoid 'cyber-squatters' registering well-known names. Registration will be open to generic names in September."

    Could I trademark a name now and go register it?

  3. intranet by tverbeek · · Score: 1, Interesting

    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/
  4. Neat! by Jonboy+X · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  5. New TLDs serve no purpose by Evro · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    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 .com, making it even less useful for its intended task - being used on mobile devices - than .com.

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    rooooar
  6. Re:the mobi tld makes sense by iangoldby · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What we really need is not .mobi, but something like .wst - sites that adhere to Web STandards.

    We don't need a special TLD for mobile devices. The problem with accessing sites with mobile devices is largely down to the failure to follow web standards. Valid HTML 4.01 + CSS (or XHTML + CSS) already makes good provision for rendering content on a variety of different devices. But very few sites use it.

    If a .wst domain was set up where adherence to Web Standards was mandatory, it would benefit all web users, not just those with mobile devices.

    (Incidently, I can give a direct example of this. I designed http://www.stnics.org/ to XHTML 1.0 Strict + CSS. I didn't make any specific provision for mobile devices, so I was very gratified the first time I saw it rendered on a Loox hand-held and it looked fine, no sideways scrolling, all content easily accessible.)

  7. Re:Nonsense and bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Nevertheless, people are actually using them for internet browsing, so it might as well be easier.

    The only way this makes sense (other than in the money-grubbing dns sense) is if the intent is for things like "yahoo" to automatically resolve to "yahoo.mobi" when using a phone/etc. Yeah, you could probably just set it up to resolve to "mobile.yahoo.com" instead, but that's a little trickier, and probably wouldn't be able to catch on at this point anyway.

    In any case, a domain where popups are disallowed is a good thing, let's just hope sites don't automatically redirect you on normal computers.. =)

  8. Re:Better Solution... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Or .wap (9, 2, 7) ?