My first guess was no, .Mobi was just another generic domain and nothing special. Approved by ICANN in 2005, it was hyped as a top level domain (TLD) dedicated to delivering the Internet to the mobile web. As near as I could tell, the only thing that set it apart from any other TLD was the tendency of an observer to immediately associate any domain in front of the extension with mobility and thus the mobile web. Ok, .Mobi said mobility. Big deal! .Com said Commercial and .Org said organization and you could still use all three interchangeably if you so desired.
There was talk that some of the big mobile operators would facilitate .Mobi domains when they encountered them. Apple and Vodafone were rumored to view .Mobi as mobile by default allowing for quicker and more accurate rendering on cell phones and PDAs. Admittedly that bit of digital bias might make a difference--if it were true. But some observers still claimed they couldn't detect a difference in sites rendered in both .Com or .Mobi. And, since regardless of entry portal, most people thought .Com first, might not any slight increase in speed and accuracy be rendered insignificant by the greater number of searchers looking for .Coms instead of .Mobis? In fact, most people going online with computers wouldn't give .Mobi so much as a thought.
What I didn't realize was that .Mobi had some almost fanatical support within the industry and the mobile-web culture itself. It's not just the financial support .Mobi gets from heavyweights like Google, Microsoft and Nokia (although that did impress me), its the impassioned following it has from seemingly innumerable nameless fans. Don't take my word for it, do some searching with .Mobi as the keyword and check it out; questioning the efficacy of .Mobi makes some web inhabitants downright angry.
That kind of support has kept .Mobi alive during the lean years and the lean years may be over. Last year for the first time there were more people accessing the web through mobile means (cell phones, PDAs, etc.) than through conventional computers. While the older generic TLDs still have the lead, it can't be long before that critical mass of mobile portals has an effect on .Mobi. With the passage of time it is no small thing any longer that .Mobi associates so easily with mobile.
Mike Nardine operates http://www.CheapMikesDomains.com and learned everything he knows about business, domains, and websites the hard way. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mike_Nardine |
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