Not Convinced By .mobi

Russ has a post about why .mobi is a good thing:

Sometimes I’d wonder if we really needed Yet Another Domain Name or if a new domain name would cause confusion, or if separating out addresses for the mobile web was really a good idea. But I have finally decided once and for all it’s a Good Thing™. Here’s why in a sentence:

We’ll finally have a standard format for initial mobile web navigation: companyname.mobi

This is the thing that’s really missing from the mobile web. There’s been no way to know exactly what the URL was for the mobile URL. There’s a bunch of redirect or handset detection magic that happens, but the end URLs are all over the place.

I’m still not really convinced. Why not just do the redirects from your standard www.example.com URL? That’s the one everyone guesses or knows already, after all, and it’s not so hard to make it work seamlessly. Also, I don’t need to type in a search engine address, since the default page on the browser comes with a Google search box already.

I do think the guidelines as to what a mobile friendly site should be are worthwhile though. I suppose we’ll all have to buy the domains anyway though, but I’ll only do so grudgingly.

Tags: .mobi, mobile