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.mobi Websites Now Available to Register
Jaruzel writes to mention a BBC article about the availability of .mobi addresses for registration. The new TLD is intended to give a home to websites specifically formatted for mobile devices. From the article: "MTLD is promising that websites with a registered dotmobi address will be optimized for mobile phones, guaranteeing users a consistent experience. It costs about $25 (£14) to register a dotmobi site for a minimum two-year period. Oliver said that while he agreed with the need to improve the mobile web experience, promises of a 'consistent experience' did not always equate with reality."
A worthless TLD just for mobile phones! It's about time.
Another useless TLD that no one will bother with, except for the spammers and the phishers.
So, who's going to be the first to register dick.mobi, or would that be against terms of service as "vulgar and/or profane"
Need money? let's just create a new TLD!
Why not just use "mobi.ibm.com", for example - why do we need a TLD for this? It's not like there's going to be millions of .mobi sites.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
If they're for mobile phones, wich usually don't have complete keyboard, doesn't it make sense to use a shorter TLD? A 4-letter one will be a pain to type for each site...
Everything sux. Cue 500 comments about how TLDs suck, computers suck and websites suck. Throw in a smartass comment about Flash just for spite. Season with bitching about spam and blogs to taste. Stir lightly. Serve with vegetable side.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I wonder if all those crazy people that wanted to try and put all internet porn on .xxx tld's are pissed that thier worthless tld didnt go through but an even more worthless tld (.mobi) did?
Freedom is a state of mind. A mind is a state of being. Stay the fuck out of my mind and my being. - Corporate Avenger
"It is not yet possible to register .mobi domains. Dot Mobi domains will be registered through ICANN accredited registrars. Please check back to this page for updates on when and where to register .mobi domains" - right underneath the big register button....
Is obviously a special "Mobi" brand key licensed at a special low rate to phone makers.
They're rolling out this top-level domain to generate publicity for Mobi's new album.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
is already taken.
There area already websites optimised for viewing with mobile phone. That this new TLD comes with a package of standards your website should live up to for mobile phone viewability is a Good Thing, but the main problem that going on the internet with your mobile has, is cost and bandwith, just like TFA says. Still, because this will get media coverage and be advertised by phone providers it could mean an increased number of people from the 'general public' will get interested and start using the technology, which could drive down the prices and encourage providers to try and increase the bandwith.
my capcha was condom
At first I thought, "Eminem will be pissed", until I found out Myanmar's TLD is .mm
Monty
When a new TLD is created because of a style issue: the web is broken. This approach of splitting mobile content from "normal" content is the wrong way to do this. CSS has media types and a media type of "handheld" FOR EXACTLY THIS PURPOSE!
.mobi is to be cash cow for the registrar. That's it. A properly design site should take advantage of the already existing method for handling this very situation. The website should change to me, not the other way around.
The only benefit to
:wq
anyone know of any registrars already seeting .mobi? i wouldnt mind picking one up, just for fun.
DotMobi CEO Neil Edwards (previously in charge of .com domains) told us that the company was going to be firm with anyone that didn't follow the guidelines drawn up and would suspend any site that didn't comply
all for that low low price , buy now !
goatse.mobi just doesn't roll off the tongue.
Trolling is a art,
Bagsy "dick.mobi" /coat
Meta will eat itself
.mobi sounds so, well, you know...
At least the useless TLD are four letters or more.
Makes it easy for program to classify them.
My web sites (XHTML1 strict, CSS), have displayed fine on mobile devices for years. Why do we need a TLD for mobile devices and why do the cell phone companies need to be involved with the W3C? These fuckheads are trying to build a parrellel proprietry web are they?
Most companies already have a mobile friendly version of there website. For example: http://www.google.com/pda
So, in order to use this TLD, which is designed for mobile devices with generally akward methods of input...you have to type a longer URL than normal. If this is supposed to be useful why not: "website.m". Google has it right with http://m.gmail.com/
My wife got me a Palm LifeDrive for our 10th wedding anniversary. Comes with 4Gb of native storage, and built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
.mobi domain, you know the page will render correctly.
.mobi domain is an other kettle of fish entirely.
With a wireless access point in the house, this had actually proven to be pretty useful - the web in the palm of your hand!
But the number of sites that provide any sort of mobile-device support is minescule. Slashdot itself renders in Blazer (the Palm browser) as a single 1 character wide column of text.
If Slashdot can't do it, do you expect the rest of the world to get it right?
At least with a
How many people actually develop sites for the
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
...dick.mobi?
From Hell's heart, I stab at thee, for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.
(Yes, the other obvious use of dick.mobi also crossed my mind. Unfortunately.)
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. - Will Duran
Damn why didnt they call it .mob? I was really looking forward to seeing www.mafia.mob
There is a possible benefit in seperating main from mobile content, mostly for reasons of size/bandwidth which cannot be achieved with CSS.
Having said that, I would say a standard subdomain would be a more sensible way - and lower cost - way to achieve this. Multiple TLDs just confuse users: "Is it ubuntu.org or ubuntu.com..." hence the reason most companies just buy them all up.
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
So, they've called something that's intended to be small and is presently of dubious usefulness ".mobi"? Wouldn't that make ".mobi" and moby antonyms?
*.hates.mobi
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
Does any country have a TLD .le? .mobi.le?
I mean, come on, isn't it obvious?
Is anyone going to force adherence to the standards? If company X registers a domain and serves content that cannot be displayed, will the domain be withdrawn? No. So what's the point of a dedicated domain?
Lets just be sensible and stick to subdomains as mentioned by an earlier poster, mobi.bbc.co.uk makes far more sense then bbc.mobi, but then of course, no-one makes tens of millions in the land-grab.
This goes against the whole point of separating style and content - the exact same web page, using a handful of CSS files that are each tailored to suit a particular medium, should look equally good on a computer monitor, a TV set, a projector or a mobile phone. Hopefully as people use percentages and ems more and pixels less, we should see a trend towards this ideal.
Saying "this site is for mobile phones, that one is for desktop computers," completely ignores all of this, telling people to go to a site designed for just their medium.
I just tried http://nic.mobi/ on a regular browser and it loaded. Now if I try something like http://google.com/ on my mobile I get a WML page.
So, is it going to be the norm for every site to give a different page depending on the type of device used to access it. If so, this TLD clearly brings nothing new.
I would much rather type a well known URL I use at home and hope it gives me page that works with my mobile instead. Not change the TLD to mobi and just *hope* it is owned by the same company.
There is no god but Google and GTalk is the messenger of Google.
or something.
A whole entire TLD just for "services" aimed to "mobile" users. .dict? ) words as TLDs!
Next step will be the ".car" for 4 wheels enthusiast services and ".c" for C language programmers.
In the end we'll have almost all dictionary (
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
At what point is this just catering to companies who are running an otherwise closed network? It goes against what I understand to be the fundamental rule of the Internet: networks should at least attempt to play nice with each other. I understand there is a business perspective here, but I can't say I'm too interested in developing (free) content for mobile devices that will just end up enhancing the value of those closed cellular networks -- especially on my own dime. Maybe the cellular providers should be getting together to provide .mobi domains to already registered matching .com, .org, .net, etc as incentives for providing that content. My naive utopian thought for the day.
Because of squatters, .mobi is gonna be a self fulfilling prophecy: everyone buys their .mobi in fear someone else might do so and blackmail them.
I've plenty of com/net domains I use for my sites, and since I'm not quite that rich, I refuse to waste thousands of dollars on a nonsense preemptive strike.
Mobi will fail anyway.
I think the heading is wrong. It says that .mobi websites are available to register. Shouldn't that have been .mobi domains?
thomasdamgaard.dk.
I've just redesigned a corporate site to use CSS-only positioning, and was able to make it render properly on every browser in reasonably current use. It uses lots of Javascripts, but they all degrade elegantly. In theory, the entire structure could be changed arbitrarily using only a different stylesheet.
If I were creating a stylesheet for mobile devices, I'd tell certain classes of images (the ones I knew would be large) not to render, (perhaps you could instruct it to use the ALT text instead,) use smaller, higher-contrast background graphics for each element, stack the side-by-side columns on top of each other, and perhaps unhide an name-anchor navigation system that's hidden on the regular stylesheet.
If you really wanted to spend a lot of time, you could make each and every image a background image, then switch to smaller versions using the mobile stylesheet.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
In my experience so-called "special" web sites made for mobile phones work much worse than the normal ones and besides that Opera mini can display just about any site perfectly (the only difference from viewing on a PC is that you will have to do a lot more paging)
Well let's just hope that this proves to be just as huge a success as .biz has been. Now, if you'll excuse me I'll just go and investigate the smoke coming out of my sarcasm detector.
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
The .mobi link Zonk provided is actually just a registar's cover page. The real (and much more web standards-based) .mobi web site is at http://pc.mtld.mobi/.
...would be better. Get all three letters on different buttons.
I guess .mob was already in use.
sic
Here is the Godaddy link to registration ($29/yr for Landrush period): https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/tlds/mobi.asp?se=%2 B
are we forced to append ".mobi" rather than prepending "mobi."? Leave aside the asinine idea of forming a TLD "for mobiles" that uses "m" and "o" right next to each other. If you could get site publishers to agree to a standard (by some other means than creating a new TLD) it would be trivial for everyone to create a sub-domain for mobile devices. There's no "mobile usability magic" in the ibm.mobi domain that couldn't more easily (and cheaply) be dealt with by a common sub-domain (mobi.ibm.com) for mobile devices.
The whole ".mobi will make it easier on mobile users" is a crock. This is a straight-up money play.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
One of the biggest pains in using my cellphone (RAZR) for web surfing is the entry of URLs and addresses via the number keypad. To enter an "M", you press 6. To enter an "O", you press 6 3 times in a row. To enter an M and then an O, you press 6, you pause for a while, then press 666. If I was EVER going to pick a domain name for a phone based site, I would make sure it had no two letters in a row that lived on the same number key.
I'm sorry, you lost me; the web uses domain names, domain names needed be websites. They could offer email, or streaming media or whatever. In fact if mobile phones has a specific set of content better delivered not via HTTP and not formatted in XHTML with CSS and numerous JPEGs PNGs and GIFs then a .mobi tld would be a half decent way to deliver it. Lets face it, if I'm an online merchant of ringtones, I probably already do my damnedest to fit the information for mobile phones. Now that doesn't mean I need a .mobi address, but it could help my overall business if mobile uses aren't thinking "hmm ringbonanza.com probably is all full of stuff my phone can't render" and are instead thinking "hmm ringbonanza.mobi is probably going to work on my phone's browser."
granted, I wish people could rely on the protocol portion of the URL to tell them that, but then again people would be bitching that http doesn't need to be modified to work with phones.
-Daniel
which has been refused a long time ago but would still be very useful in today's context.
Animoog.org
sucks.mobi/does/
Yet again, Slashdotters PC-centric world view blinkers them to why this is actually a good thing.
.mobi on your phone - within a year it will be assumed unless you type a different .tld. So to find a listing of all the ho's in your area, you will be able to press the services button on your phone and type 'hoe', which will automatically go to hoe.mobi.
.css file for mobile users, you've severely misunderstood things.
Here's an outline as I see it:
- You won't have to type
- Because the content is XHTML-MP only, there won't be a confusion of competing markup standards. If you have ever tried to make a mobile-orientated site, you'll understand the pain of trying to support more than one phone manufacturer. If you think the answer to supporting mobile sites is to add a different
- It's easy to dismiss mobile sites as pointless but that's because the man-on-the-street is only just starting to understand mobile internet technologies (yes, wap was a heap of shit, but things have moved on a lot since).
If you want to cling to your 1990's PC-centric view, that's fine, but over here it's 2006.
auto.mobi/e
and for the handicapped
i.mobi/e
and for the rest of the shit there's
gimme.mobi/e
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
How hard is it for web sites to check the browser user agent and output something relevant? It's not as if many sites don't do this already anyway.
just use a server-side script to redirect when the UA string smells like coming from a mobile device. how hard is this?
Well, there is always
bat.mobi
eatcornandwatcha.mobi
savetheanchobi.mobi
lonechowwagon.mobi
I think whoever decided on the "mobi" TLD is also anticipating Ebonics to shiver all pronunciations of a "B" to a "V" in their alphabet, thereby transforming the biase of a declared TLD and its content to be not "mobile-technologies" but independent movies that compete against the private administration of RIAA and MPAA and Gougle/YouTube. That is unlike Germans with their pronouncing a "P" for a "B" or otherwise noting a shift in their breathing patterns over time that are remeniscent durring a War when someone runs and talks; inhaling to a "B" or ex-haling to a "P." All of a sudden, I feel like chewing on some honey-bee wax while standing above the urinal.
It would be nice to have a really lite slashdot.mobi
... does he really need his own TLD? He's already got a tea shop and all. Seems like a bit much just for one musician.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
You might not like it but its just a fact. The mobile market place is the next big rush.
.mobi didn't happen because of evil registrars, it happened because the marketplace wanted it.
I work for a company thats in technology, so we watch trends pretty closely. Mobile space isn't even on our map yet but we attend CTIA and look for opportunities very carefully. It would probably be irresponsible for us not to. People want mobile technology and at some point, at least for more casual things, laptops don't cut it.
So sure, its probably more marketing then technological revolution (wow, new TLD) but the people and business that will use it are whats making it happen. Not the other way.
Think of it as market segmentation.
Quack, quack.
By the time everyone's aware of .mobi domains and they're in mainstream use, people's cell phones will have full-function browsers, thus negating the need for WAP sites.
They allow a Russian guy to register wunderground.mobi , here comes the dotcom cybersquatting again.
Check http://pc.mtld.mobi/whois/index.php , put wunderground.mobi to search box and see the result yourself. While on it, check slashdot.mobi , it is taken too.
Weather Underground is one of the oldest sites on web (they started with Telnet/Gopher!) and they have a dedicated mobile (WAP) version at
http://m.wunderground.com/
So, a Russian guy can get that wunderground.mobi yes? What guarantees there won't be some "Enter your credit card details for plus access" on that page?
Cybersquatting in 2006, great. The question is: They are that naive or is this on purpose?