Domains with the extension .mobi will be available soon. The so-called “land rush” is underway, during which companies may register .mobi domains for which they hold a trademark, and a queue is forming for the public to snatch up the rest.
Here are my 9 reasons why .mobi is a bad idea:
- You can already serve mobile content from any subdomain or folder, like mobi.example.com or example.com/mobi
- You can already use content negotiation. If the browser says “Accept: text/vnd.wap.wml”, then return mobile content.
- You can already use the “handheld” media type in your CSS.
- You can already create light-weight, semantic HTML that can be viewed on multiple devices.
- Since “mobi” isn’t a word, it’s not likely to be in the predictive text dictionary on most phones. A good domain for phones would employ a real word. (Actually .com works.)
- Without predictive text, typing “mobi” on a phone means pressing 6, then waiting, then 6-2-4. A good domain for phones would not use two adjacent letters on the same key.
- Phones with QWERTY keyboards are likely to have full-fledged browsers that can view .com websites anyway.
- Dot-mobi domains are expensive.
- Browsers like Opera can rerender existing web sites to make them viewable on movable devices.
If you see value in .mobi that I’m not seeing, let me know, but I think it will be a failure. We should as soon introduce a .BestViewedWithInternetExplorerAt800by600 domain so we can keep track of all those web pages from the 90′s.
That’s a SEO perspective for you, anything but a .com is worth less. other extensions are gaining head way I mean people are starting to recognize more and more that other extensions exist besides the .com.
I would comment on mobile tech but I don’t have any knowledge there, so I’ll leave that up to you.
It wont click for sure.
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