On the other hand, I will register one for "branded" site once the landrush phase is over, since it DOES offer a mobile service. $25 is worth it in case this eventually does become a "must" for mobile information sites.
There are a lot of big players behind it and they [initially] seem to have gone to great lengths to stop speculators /domainers doing what they did to .eu on such an unprecedented scale.
Like a fool I backordered 20 .mobi domains through Pool.com and still regret buying half of them.
That said, who knows what they MIGHT be worth in ten years from now.
That's what they said about .cn names - what a waste of time and money that was!
I've bought a .mobi (well, two) and now have a skeletal service running on it because .mobi DOES have some value IMHO.
1) It sets standards (eg XHTML) and recommendations (eg max page weight of 20kB) for .mobi sites which means the sites should work on most mobile devices AND not be hideously expensive and slow to access like under the bad old days of dot-bomb WAP.
2) The XHTML in which .mobi sites have to be implemented is pretty familiar and capable, and fast to manipulate, and compatible with most tools in a developers toolkit: I was able to make functional (and *just-about* useful!) versions of my existing HTML pages relatively quickly and easily. (I still have a lot of ergonmics work to do, but the technology is now in place.)
3) There's a LOT of phones about, and a .mobi site that works well could be one thing less that people need a desktop or Internet cafe or laptop for...
Rgds
Damon
PS. See my .mobi thread at [webmasterworld.com...]
[edited by: DamonHD at 12:47 pm (utc) on Sep. 29, 2006]
I suppose I have to buy them to keep other people from taking my domain name just in case. The price goes way down if you wait out the rush.
I dont think it will work because it took 10+ years for phone to go from huge things you used to carry the battery about with down to the small D500's.
I think the biggest thing we have to remember is SMS because SMS capability has ALWAYS been on the cell phones, just hidden away amongst 20 menues and really when you think about it SMS has only really taken off in the last 3/4 years.
Then there is WAP. Not sure about the rest of the world but here in the UK it can be a little expensive to go on the phone and play on the net so most dont - especially the main market (teens) because they use PAYG and simply cant afford it.
I guess its the things i listed above that make me a skeptic but hey - good luck to those who got .mobi.
Deep down im just a good old dot commer lol
Seffy
I got my original "housebrick" Nokia Communicator because it was very early to do SMS (and had a QWERTY keyboard!) and I've always seen the value of SMS. Cheap and powerful and it soon began to work between telcos too. (All that and delivery reports...)
WAP1 was cruddy, buggy, limited technology (I know because I was all-but CTO for a dot-com company trying to get a product usable on the very first WAP Aphones), and VERY VERY slow and expensive to use because the telcos though they could charge as much as 50p *per pageview*!
The .mobi standards make for quicker, better, cheaper pages across a wider range of devices, with page delivery over (cheap, commodity) IP. You could now even consider SMS-over-.mobi as a realistic business given GSM/3G data pricing, even for PAYG customers.
Rgds
Damon
I agree with your comments but let's not forget that the cost of 3G access here in the UK has tumbled over the past year.
My HSPDA contract is only £40.00 monthly for unlimited data.
T-Mobile Web N Walk PAYG is also capped at £1 per day regardless of how much you download.
Firehorse:
.cn names are not important yet, particuarly as only a tiny minority of the Chinese population have (censored) internet access. When this changes and a decent % of 1.3 billion people get online, you'll see just how important a .cn domain will be to ANY western corporation targeting the Chinese market.
I think also to make the .mobi work the software company who develops the software for the mobile/cell needs to do something fresh - most phone are ran of Symbian i think? im not sure im not a cell phone buff lol but still - rather than making the software just to default to the .mobi ext rather then the .com seems pretty pointless to me.
Ive heard on the grapevine there talking about bringing out a .Tel - how true this is i dont know but if that does happen that will be just another waste of an ext like the .mobi - or it could be a rival - who knows all i know right at this point in time is im very skeptical and i dont think i will waste my money.
Im just looking at the whole "Vista" buzz last year/early this year - so many people brought "Vista" related name and well - we all know what happend to that lol
But like i said in the thread earlier - good luck to those who got some .mobi's and i with them all the best - ill look like the idiot if it does take off but i just see it as ending up like the .ws/.cc - there known - but no significant value.
Seffy
Normally I wait a year to see if the buzz on some "new" hyped technology has died down before I waste much time finding out if it has real value. By then the techies will have given the substance a good run for its money. I did that with Java, for example, and have been a Java lover ever since. Google too, IIRC.
In this case I'm just taking a punt! Neither your nor I need look silly whether .mobi succeeds or fails, it's a genuiniely interesting experiment, but with more chance than dot-bomb-WAP1 had!
Let's give it a year and see what happens.
(I also just started my first AdWords "mobile ad" campaign today.)
Rgds
Damon
1) It sets standards (eg XHTML) and recommendations (eg max page weight of 20kB) for .mobi sites which means the sites should work on most mobile devices AND not be hideously expensive and slow to access like under the bad old days of dot-bomb WAP.
So?
Will those standards and recommendations be enforced? Will you lose your .mobi domain if you don't follow them?
If there is no enforcement, there is no benefit. One could just as easily set up mobi.mydomain.dom instead of mydomain.mobi and follow those standards and recommendations.
Too long? Have your www.mydomain.dom redirect to mobi.mydomain.dom for mobile users, or offer a link at the top of the page. Or, just have mobile devices search for a mobi.mydomain.dom first when the user enters mydomain.dom.
Having mobile devices default to .mobi when you type in a domain will only be of use if the .com domain owner and the .mobi domain owner are the same. So, some trademark owners may benefit, but many others will not. Your web site visitors will have to remember both your web site URL and your .mobi URL.
If you will market strictly to mobile users, it may be of benefit, especially if the devices default to .mobi. If you own both mydomain.com and mydomain.mobi, it may be of some benefit, especially if the devices default to .mobi. But, for everyone else, it will just be a source of confusion and frustration for both webmasters and device users.
Yes, there is enforcement. Have a look at [mobi...] for the rules.
No, I don't intend to get a .com for every .mobi, etc, because the ergonomics are so different that I'm having a whole new site and *short* URL, though driven by the same back-end and data. The mobile and non-mobile domains are linked to one another to allow navigation between them, and, for example, the Opera embedded in my Nokia Communicator is happy with either of them.
Rgds
Damon
Yes, but you seem to have forgotten a tiny detail in your statement - that all these 1.3 billion people speak and write in a complicated language that is a million miles from the ASCII character set, not to mention that its also peppered with regional differences, just to complicate things further.
In addition, IDN's or something else will more likely have greater pull and support than the west's ASCII character system, once all these chinese learn to read and write AND use keyboards etc.
Do you really think that they will bother to use an evil empire's character system, that they first have to learn and that is so alien to their own, when they have no need?
Three point five years ago, I invested in many of these names, all generic everyday terms, with potentially untold fortunes in the future. In total, I ended up with a handful of visitors for all my domains, probably from domain speculators and nothing else. It then dawned on me, as it should to you, that, hey, the Chinese have their own language, so what do they want with ours? They don't want anything, Jack. I then let all my domains go and invested elsewhere.
Keep dreaming.....
A complicated language to whom? If western corporations believe there is an enormous untapped market, they will quickly adapt. You can bet on that. Chinese will not need to learn the west's ASCII character system as the west will gladly oblige by offering services in whatever language is required.
Do not forget that if only twenty per cent of Chinese have access to the internet within the next decade, that will give a new market larger than the entire US population.
You might just be right about the domain names, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
Back to the topic at hand, I received an email from Pool.com this morning confirming they had acquired 8 of my ten .mobi domains. Now I know that 7 will probably never be used, but one golden domain definitely has potential.
Believe me, the Chinese language is not straight forward, even for the Chinese.
The language is not formed in the same way as we understand characters in the west and I believe there are something like 75,000 possible characters to choose from, depending on the circumstances of what is being written and other factors.
Why do you think the Chinese will choose western or western-backed corporations before their own?
I appreciate that the Chinese need western assistance, in a variety of forms, but that may not last very long, as they savvy up to all that is necessary to cope on their own.
I view China as potent as Japan was/is, but on an immense scale that anyone has yet to comprehend. Being Oriental, the Chinese possess many of the same attributes that made Japan a phenomenal success, even though China will have to address some dark and disturbing truths about themselves, as well as clean up their act in mnay areas.
As you may know, there are presently 2 China's running in parallel. China 1 is like Hong Kong and the one we all see on TV. China 2, which represents how the majority of the Chinese live, is still languishing in the 12th Century, without things like electricity, running water, roads, machinery or sewage management. In addition, there is a total abscence of any form of advancement in thinking/attitudes/education that the rest of the modern world has experienced. This will take at least 40-50 years to change.
Yes, for the purposes of this thread, there will be more Chinese using the internet as time goes by, but I see no reason for any of them to ditch their own language and use a western character set befor their own.
I believe the .cn "invitation" or "lure" by the Chinese was a red herring, a super example of how the orientals play tricks on outsiders and so my advice is that anyone still holding onto these names should sell/dump them at their earliest opportunity. It is a bottomless pit, Jack.
