For domainers and website owners alike, .mobi TLD was seen as one of the biggest domain name innovation failure of all times. The major factor leading to .mobi’s non-acceptance and criticism was its alleged non-conformity to principles of device independence. There was a lot of argument that content tailored to fit mobile devices could be achieved in other ways than to create a XHTML-MP site, as required by .mobi. Thus, this extension was lost into oblivion as website owner’s implemented HTTP content negotiation, cascading style sheets and special mobile browser plug-ins to make their websites compatible with mobile devices.

Along came the advent of mobile internet…

During the initial launch of .mobi, mobile internet was still in its infancy. mTLD Top Level Domain Ltd (the official management company of .mobi) saw this as an opportune time to capitalize on the steady growth of this industry, and thus, .mobi TLD was launched to public on September 26th, 2006. This extension gained a fine standing amongst high profile companies, such as, Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, Vodafone; to name a few. Even so, somehow the extension did not suit the general public preference, thus signaling the beginning of its end.
2009 has seen a distinct lean towards mobile web. Beginning with iPod, the mobile internet vehemence has been given a virtual kick upwards, and now Nokia and HTC have followed suit to produce fully optimized web internet devices.

So what has the amplification of mobile web got to do with .mobi?

Big companies, such as the BBC, have raced to bring the mobile friendly version of their websites online. On the same context, there have been various plug-ins, code changes and enhancements made to existing sites to conform to the mobile version. WordPress Mobile Edition, for instance, is a plug-in designed to convert an existing WordPress site into a mobile version. However, this conversion of sites necessarily does not optimize it for the mobile web. Sites with complex designs, such as forum boards, still have a difficult time adapting to a mobile friendly version.
The .mobi TLD, therefore, has simplified things for those website owners thinking of going mobile. Since any .mobi site has to be optimized to be viewable on mobile device, there is no additional code changes needed to turn your website into a mobile website. Instant Mobilizer, a product from .mobi, can turn your existing site into a mobile site in seconds, while preserving the pictures, text and formatting of the original website. Moreover, existing sites, converted to mobile sites through code changes and plug-ins, can still be painfully slow and unresponsive. Sites optimized by .mobi are acknowledged to load and run on the fly.

So will .mobi really take off?

Despite the growth of mobile internet, there is still a wide spread public reluctance to employ the .mobi top level domain. Every day, more and more users are acclimatizing to handhelds and mobiles, but businesses and companies are far off from making a shift from conventional website design to a mobile one. What is your take on mobile web and its correlation with the .mobi domain?

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