Is .mobi the right answer?
One of the new “innovations” featured at CTIA this week was the new .mobi domain for the Internet. This is a new top level domain (TLD) similar to .com, .net, .org, .us etc. designed specifically for web content tailored for viewing on mobile devices. The effort is backed, and will be administered by, a company called mTLD formed and funded by Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Hutchison 3, T-Mobile, Telefonica Moviles, Telefonica Italia Mobile, Vodafone, Microsoft, Google, and others.
If you’ve ever tried to surf the web on your mobile device, you probably understand the problem being “solved” by this new domain. In short, many websites are poorly formated, hard to read, and hard to navigate on mobile devices. Content sections may be hard coded to be wider than the window size of a smartphone, forcing you to scroll the window left and right to read the content, or content from different columns may become interspersed to make it hard or impossible to figure out what goes with what.
By specifying a new top level domain, a domain like lawofmobility.com can have a sister domain at lawofmobility.mobi which is specifically designed to work with mobile devices.
It sounds great, but to me it sounds like using a nuclear weapon to kill a cockroach. In short, not only are there simpler ways to solve the problem, but the solution introduces other challenges, and at the end of the day, the cockroach/problems may still exist.
First, the simpler solutions. For starters, it’s possible to design a web page that works perfectly well on just about any device. For example, I haven’t yet found a device where lawofmobility.com isn’t readable and reasonably usable. I credit the designers of WordPress and the standard template I’m using for designing their products to adapt well to different environments. In fact, when Cascading Style Sheets were introduced to the Web by the W3C, one of the goals was specifically to address this problem (“It is also an important means of adapting pages to different devices, such as mobile phones or printers.”) So, a graceful solution already exists for adapting web content to work well with mobile devices.
However, sometimes, a completely different approach to designing the user interface makes sense for mobile devices than for bigger devices with easier input. For example, when I designed the Seek-First user interface, it made sense for desktop users to provide additional information in a bar down the left of the results window. But this didn’t work for mobile users, so I designed a different interface for mobile users that not only looks different, but also works slightly differently. (See the differences here: desktop and mobile.) Since these changes required a different back-end program, I provided two different web addresses: www.seek-first.com for desktop and m.seek-first.com for mobile.
This points to the damage caused by the new .mobi domain. Under the new domain scenario, instead of entering m.seek-first.com I would need to enter www.seek-first.mobi - an increase of 3 characters to input - which is one of the challenges of doing anything on a mobile device. Even worse, since there was the opportunity to choose a new domain, why did mTLD choose one that has “m” and “o” right next to each other? Anyone who has really used a phone to type in a domain name can tell you that having to enter two letters back to back using the same key (”6″ in this case) is harder than entering two letters that are on different keys. If you’re going to create a new top level domain specifically for mobile devices, why not pick one that actually is as easy as possible for mobile users?
Finally, will the cockroach survive anyway, despite all this damage? There’s such a broad array of mobile devices with different web capabilities (my wife’s Samsung A900 is dramatically different from my Sprint PPC-6700) that web developers are still going to have to use some of the above techniques to effectively present content for users with differing capabilities on their various mobile devices.
Oh well, I guess mTLD should at least get partial credit for good intentions?
April 10th, 2006 at 8:03 am
Back before IP was the rave, we had the same issue with telephone numbers to a degree. We had numbers for phone, fax, paging, toll-free, remote access, and other applications. We actually had a project to conceptualize the right answer to how to make this digestible by the masses. We looked a custom NPA assignments, central numbers, etc. We even looked at adding another last digit — 1 for phone, 2 for fax, 3 for pager, etc. None of these were really the best — what was the best was to have one phone number and have the network know what type of device was calling and automatically route it to that destination device. After all, on answering, you can detect a fax machine is calling.
I don’t think the Internet should be any different. We need better device awareness, and a single domain should be able to detect “It’s a cell phone” and serve up the cell phone friendly version of the site. .mobi is a bad solution by the wrong people. The mobile industry is impatient and wants to speed all this up with a special domain. But I don’t think that will work — because, according to the Law of Mobility — everything’s going to be accesible to the mobile networks. They don’t need .mobi for ‘mobile’, they need .sss for ’small screen size’ if you’re going to have anything. It’s the wrong name for the wrong problem all the way around.
April 10th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Thanks for the note Danny. But .sss isn’t going to cut it… Three in a row on the same key (777)… .sds might work (737) for “small device size” or something…
April 12th, 2006 at 6:40 am
Oh I was not serious about .sss, it was exempletive of how it does not work. I like your m.website.com idea better, it makes more sense.
July 5th, 2006 at 7:44 am
[...] The mobile world failed, simply because the web developers of that global business had failed to accomodate the needs of a mobile user. As I’ve pointed out before, this is not such a hard problem to solve. Broad adoption of mobile-friendly adaptation of web content would be a huge first step towards making the Mobile World a better world. [...]
July 6th, 2006 at 7:03 am
[...] Techdirt is reporting that domain registrations for the .mobi TLD are lagging to the point that the .mobi folks have had to extend the registration period. Of course, this is no surprise to us, since: [...]