Via NamePros. jeffoverman (NamePros member) writes:
Hi
A great domainer and a person but someone that dosent believe in .mobi but he just got his blog into mobi format.
Big domainers, if you want more more readers you need to do this and follow this.
I am always on my crackberry reading blogs and Rick and frank can take a lesson in this. Follow this path and gave your blog mobi friendly.
When I read 7mile what a pain and it always kicks me in the middle of the blog
So happy http://www.conceptualist.com/ just did this recently.
If he reads this, nice job and happy holidays. Tell your buddies Rick and frank to follow so I can read the top 3 blog domainers I read on my crackberry with ease and not have page download that takes well over a minute lol
About a week ago a reader of my blog left a constructive comment regarding loading issue and bandwidth costs:
….One (very small) request.. I read your blog on my mobile phone going to work each morning. Today - the butterfly photos consumed over half of my monthly mobile data allowance (I only have 10Mb / month). I’d be so grateful if you could you use something like irfanview to make photos smaller in size (kb) before uploading them? On the web, even at 30-50kb, jpgs look almost as great as they do at 300k-500k.
Listening to my readers, I went to my tech team and asked them to come up with some solution, as I didn’t feel like running every image on infraview (image software) before posting (time consuming). Maybe some automated conversion software for images? The answer my tech team came out with was to make the blog Mobile compliant.
I didn’t pay much attention to it until now. Just went on my iPhone to see how the site looks and while it loads fast, it misses the colors, the vibe, layout. However, mobile browsing has a different experience/needs then PC browsing. Loading speed is a defining part of the mobile experience, layout is (ease of navigation on small screens), as well as costs.
Optimizing pages to mobile phones, whichever way you choose, is a compromise. Looking at my blog on iPhone I feel allot is lost, allot is gained.
With all that said, using mobile compliant technology (which also includes .mobi compliancy along with WAP) did not mean I had to go and get .Mobi domain. It also did not mean I had to train my visitors to type such a domain extension, nor does it jeopardizes my brand name (Conceptualist dot com). It simply meant better (and that’s just my opinion) browsing experience for my blog readers today. Technology though changes faster than ever. Bandwidth costs will go down, connectivity will get stronger and faster. From a layout perspective iPhone is already doing a good job displaying full HTML pages and from here on it will just get better as well.
So today the blog is mobile compliant, tomorrow it may be using some other mobile technology, if any.
Writing all this I realize the importance of using one domain extension for your business (whatever extension is a different story). If I had to use another extension for my blog because of tech issues what would happen when a new extension comes later that offer some new technological advantage as well? Do I have to buy that domain as well? And what if it’s taken? Are my visitors, because I now trained them that my site is “domain extension friendly”, will go and type my brand with that new extension hoping to get to my brand but ending up elsewhere? Isn’t the better solution is to continue to use your one domain extension and put on it all these compliant technologies, such as the case here? From brand perspective using mobile compliant technology just made my .com brand stronger. We did that without the need for another extension, we did not need a .Mobi domain for that. If this shows anything in my eyes, it shows how irrelevant the extension is today. It may change in the future, but today, just irrelevant.
Comments on this issue are most welcome. Maybe I can learn another thing or two. Thanks to jeffoverman for bringing the issue to light, much appreciated.
Frankly, the problem is that US Mobile phones including the iPhone are obsolete junk.
Do you really think the solution is reformating and compressing everything so it will display on this half baked offering from Apple, when the rest of the World is moving to HD Television on a mobile.
The delays in launching an iPhone in the Far East including Japan are primarily related to the fact that Apple know that if they cannot offer 3G they are going to be laughed at. By the time they get to 3G most other operators and equipment supplier will be starting to move to 4G.
Sahar,
Seems like the seed has been planted. You may not need or want conceptualist.mobi but don’t discount .mobi for everyone.
I think .mobi sites will take off with regards to “near me” type information. Think about pizza.com or pizza.mobi. Which site would you visit if you just got off a plane in a city you’ve never been to before?
The “find stuff near me” type of services are perfect for .mobi. The other types of services are the flowers.mobi type where someone needs to order a gift or product or service while on the go. Last minute gifts, books, car wash and stuff like that.
So, conceptualist.mobi may not need to be developed but at least you are thinking about developing for the mobile experience and that at least adds to the discussion about .mobi and that’s fine with me.
As Rick says, watch the MARKET. Sounds like the customers are demanding a mobile experience and that should increase the MARKET for .mobi domains.
Rob,
The mobile market is going to be massive.
The problem is there is absolutely nothing that dot mobi can offer that dot com cannot. The converse is obviously not true, and there is no built in advantage to be gain from being constrained to a limited format.
I recently did the same with domaining.com and I am planning to do the same with all the services we run.
In fact there is no need to have a dot Mobi dmain to can offer to mobile users a great browsing experience.
Sahar, me and others we are saving money, time and capitalizing on what we already have.
I will repeat again the same:
Dot Mobi will make sense the day Google will serve different serps for mobile users, giving better rankings to dot mobi sites. The day this will happen, the dot mobi will make sense and the use of this extension will land off.
actually the converse IS true…mobi sites can autodetect also and give a full experience to a pc…Sahar…I vist this blog each morning on a itouch…a few graphics would be nice…most mobi sites at least have a logo on top…keep up the good work.
I don’t know if you are using one of these, but there are two WordPress plugins that will more or less make your site “mobile ready”: WordPress Mobile Plugin and WordPress Mobile Edition. I’m using the latter and it seems to be working fine.
As someone who often reads blogs on a mobile phone, there is one thing that I find really, really important: provide full feeds. I read blogs using Google’s mobile reader and if you have a full feed I don’t even have to visit your site to read it. Instant gratification! If you want to go all out, providing feeds for the comments is another great idea (which I subscribe to on a handful of blogs). Of course commenting is always a pain (to me not because of a limited website, but rather because I just don’t have kiddie fingers anymore).
I am back just for something I found strange.
Reading the full post I remember that few month ago you written the post:
Hello iPhone - Good bye iPhone!
http://www.conceptualist.com/2007/07/31/hi-iphone-bye-iphone/
So are you not supposed to no longer have an iPhone now?
Your current post outlines the inverse. What happend?
—-answer—-
Just change of hearts. I like the browsing experience, hate the phone. For now, keeping it.
Cheers
Sahar
Tim,
It is not true. Mobi does not have the mind-share or type-in that dot com does and almost certainly never will.
If you are a large corporate it makes sense to tweak your existing site rather than break your balls trying to synchronize two sites. The dot com already has everything. Large corporates got on the dot mobi bandwagon because they were sold the idea that the market was going to be segmented by technologies. It is not and most of them now understand that it is not. The others will wake up to reality when they are getting their arse whipped by the competition.
who said anything about mind share or type-ins?
Mobi is a useless extension. The founders and investors in DOTMOBI, which include MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, NOKIA, DEUTSCHE TELEKOM, VODAFONE, TELECOM ITALIA MOBILITY, SAMSUNG,VISA, have accomplished very little, so what do they know about the user experience and the nascent mobile Internet. NOTHING. They didn’t see “iPHONE” coming. Yes, I know the CEO of GOOGLE is on the BOARD of DIRECTORS of APPLE, but I guess he didn’t know about the iPHONE; therefore, Google invested in DOTMOBI anyway.
Why would anyone want to go to a dotmobi site? DOTCOM is superior and it offers a full site version, not a micro “watered-down” version. Who cares that users may prefer a streamlined version while they are on the go. If they choose to access “Tokyo” via voice commands and/or detection, they must go to a dotcom site. If they say and type in “Bank of America”, we must force them to go bankofamerica.com, not bofa.mobi.
I agree, MOBI is a useless extension. Time is money, which reminds me forget about time.mobi - go to time.com — it may take longer to read, but so what - deal with it!
Roger that is nonsense and you know it, or at least you should.
Any Dot Com can incorporate a “watered-down” version on a separate page, and auto-sensing can send you directly there. There is also no reason why location cannot be detected from the phone and used to target advertising on dot com site either.
Of course 90% or more website owners will not bother to provide a mobile friendly version, but never fear, the latest generation of browsers are going to be able to condense the content of just about any site for mobile display if you are struggling with an obsolete handset.
The bottom line is that Mobi has been contrived to overcome the limitations of mobile browsing. Unfortunately, for Dot Mobi investors technological developments are out pacing it. Even the iPhone is just about obsolete already, and that handles browsing without difficulty.
The whole concept that market would be segmented by browsing platforms was totally flawed. Of course it was not immediately apparent to most and is still not clear to many. However, Mobi will go the way of Dot TV. Just look at the brains behind the relaunch of the latter, and just observe how far it has flown!
David,
I agree this DOTMOBI is a useless extension.
I even hear many people are accessing the dotmobi versions of what website from their PCs, as they want just “snapshots’ of these sites
I even hear some people prefer to see the full dotcom versions from their mobile phones - FOOLS! If they’re accessing a site (GOOGLE, TIME, New York Times), we should automatically force them to view the “mobile versions”, even if they prefer to view the full dotcom versions
There’s not a lot of Internet surfing via the TV, so I don’t see the analogy/comparison
We know DOTMOBI is useless — it just provides a choice for the user and assures them they will see a certified mobile version — i say we should give them NO choice — let’s make sure they stay on the DOTCOM path - and, of course, even though the market caps of the DOTMOBI founders and investors are in the hundreds of billions, so what — they made a mistake and miscalculation with DOTMOBI.
Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung, Google - innovators? Absolutely not, they missed the boat on DOTMOBI– and they need to steer their customer base to DOTCOM - the promised land and give them NO choice. They know what’s best for their customers, and if they access the sites from mobile phones, direct them to mobile versions, even they prefer the dotcom version. If they access from their PCs and wish a “mobile” version, tough luck - they get the full dotcom versions.
RIP - DOTMOBI — you provided an alternative viewing experience for the consumer — but it’s not necessary, leave the choice to the website owners and big corporations — we don’t need you - just go away –and get off our turf!
here is my conspiracy theory:
how much money all the registrars are making from .mobi?
millions of dollars every year.
doesn’t it make perfect sense for them to go and buy a few .mobis for $xxx,xxx every few month just to keep this market growing?
Yaron,
Of course HYPE is a factor. I have to admit I originally thought Rick was guilty of being involved in this with the flowers.mobi purchase, but I have accepted his explanation that he too has just be sucked in. Of course MTLD have the right to market their extension, but if they are going to thrust themselves on to our market, they must expect their arguments to stand up to analysis. Of course that offends them. Why?
My posts are meant for constructive discussions, not pumping one extension or another. If i see a pattern, as I have here, I will not approve such comments.
Happy holidays!
Sahar
Very cool! I just happened to visit on my blackberry. I deffinetly need to make DotSauce mobi friendly.
Mark
http://www.dotsauce.com
Sahar,
wow…I just checked your blog just now(took couple days off due to the holidays) and tried relaxing without thinking domains that much.
I am a very happy camper…Shocked you posted this, my 2 seconds of fame I guess among one of the greatest rags to riches in the domain industry…Great job Sahar in your success and past.
Always enjoy reading your thoughts and views…Keep up the great work and writting..
As far as the iphone goes-I am not a user nor will I will be. It takes double the time to write an email vs my blackberry. The browser is top notch but my blackberry does a great job. I personally call the iphone junk even though I am an investor in .mobi.
1. You spend 500 bucks on a phone and you need to send the phone back to apple for a rejuice of the phone to apple. So your without the phone for a few days unless you have an extra phone.
2. 500 bucks is a lot and there are surly much better phones out on the market. It takes double the time to write an email vs buttons.
Maybe one day I will get the iphone with wimax features and a better battery design. I am not into itunes…I just want a browser and email and I love how people say how the iphone is going kill the blackberry(what a joke that is).
I am into .mobi and one of my biggest risks for the extension is this: the software side-just like how I punch into .com it kicks into mobi format…just like how you type in flowers.com and guess what it kicks into .mobi friendly. I believe insurance.mobi sold very high, the owner could have saved some bucks into what Sahar just did for his blog and kicks into .mobi friendly.
I decided to invest in the extension for these reasons:
1. more cell phones then pcs
2. look at the japan market (usa is 3 to 5 years behind them)
3. When I am rushing out of the door or running late what do I grab first? guess what my phone as I am addicted to my crackberry.
4. With admob, google going be a hard pusher of mobi and mobi advertising.
5. The future holds well for .mobi. The question is this: will people type in flowers.com vs flowers.mobi on there cell phones?
6. I missed the .com when it was forming- I feel the next wave could be .mobi but I am more upbeat on the .tv extension
I am not bashing .mobi at all…Its only a portion of my names as I make “hedges”…Part of my names are .mobi, a good portion in .tv (the next big wave and future of the market and believe it will be in second place behind .com). We all know .com will be king, as it should be.
Anyways, the point being is this after this long post and had to reply some comments above. Thanks so much in making your blog .mobi friendly and now I can have my feet up on desk reading a user friendly blog while I am at my dead end second job at night.
Happy Holidays Sahar and thanks again.
Cheers,
Jeff