I just posted a list of my favorite mobile alternative sites (sites which are the mobile version of a regular website), and it struck me how few of these sites actually use the .mobi top level domain. It is kind of sad how little .mobi has caught on, just like mobile-specific style sheets in the wild are few and far between. How are mobile users supposed to discover where they can get their mobile content? Some sites automatically sense the mobile browser’s user agent and adjust themselves accordingly, which I think is ideal. For every other site, are we supposed to try to load the “real” site in our mobile browsers, hope it doesn’t crash, then try to find the “mobile verison” link buried in the footer? It would be really nice if there was standard markup or HTTP header standard to redirect mobile clients to a mobile-friendly version. For example, I would love to see something like this embedded in the HEAD of the LA Times homepage:
<link href="http://mobile.latimes.com/" rel="alternate" media="mobile" type="text/xhtml" />
Update (1/18/08): According to Russell Beattie, it’s possible right now. The media type is “handheld”, not “mobile” but it works. Now use it!
Until that day comes, site owners are doomed to make up their own standard. Lately M-dot subdomains have become popular, and mobile-dot or wap-dot sites have been around even longer. Other sites put the mobile version in a separate sub-directory. Based on my current site list, here’s a chart breaking down the methods that various websites use to distinguish their mobile content. Legend: SLD = second-level domain (like m.flickr.com); I realized too late that the correct term is third-level, but that collides with TLD which is top-level domain (as in .mobi) so I hope this chart still makes sense. The point is that the majority of sites that I could find for my list indicate mobile content with subdomains. Yes, not a very scientific study, I admit. Yes, I know there are 500,000 .mobi registrations, but squatters and ChadsAwesomeWebsite.mobi don’t count; I’m talking about discoverability. Where the heck is slashdot.mobi? How come this site doesn’t work as wordpress.mobi?
When it comes to the subdomains themselves, which is currently the most popular? I couldn’t stop making charts, so here’s another one (to the left). M-dot is the cool newcomer, but still in the minority. Mobile-dot is the current leader, followed by trusty ol’ wap-dot. It seems like a lot of companies consider “.com” as part of their name, or at least think their customers do.
Here’s a marketing idea for the dot mobi people, who are trying to buck this trend: make free .mobi redirects for the top 10,000 websites that don’t already have a .mobi domain, but may have a mobile version somewhere. For those without a decent mobile site, redirect their “trial” .mobi domain to their main site through a mobile transcoder. Heck, just do it for Typepad.com, WordPress.com, and Blogger.com and you’ll have millions of sites right there. At the end of a month or two, turn it off and have your sales people call them up to explain the drop in traffic. If that doesn’t sell cnet.mobi, I don’t know what will. It will have the added benefit of making customers expect the .mobi TLD. When their customer service lines light up with “how come your mobile site stopped working” calls, they’ll realize their customers have mobile browsers and they’re using them.
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