dotMobi (.mobi) Showcase Launched
Just three months after the launch of the .mobi extension, more than 330,000 .mobi domains have been registered (mostly by domainers), and increasing numbers of these domains now feature live websites.
The dotMobi (.mobi) showcase at http://showcase.mtld.mobi/ displays an impressive sampling of .mobi sites in various categories. The showcase uses a "mobile emulator" to display websites exactly as they would look on a mobile phone.
Here are a few examples of working .mobi sites:
bmw.mobi - businessweek.mobi - feedmesports.mobi - google.mobi - manhattan.mobi
Interestingly, the mobile emulator isn't limited to .mobi sites. You can enter any website into the mobile emulator to see what it would look like on a mobile phone. We don't mention any examples here because the results for many major websites are not that impressive! Try it for yourself at any of the above links.
To make your site .mobi compatible, only two basic requirements apply:
- You need to include mobile xhtml code on your site (basically html with a few enhanced features for mobile devices)
- You can't use any frames on your site.
Additionally, there are many "best practices" suggestions shown at this .mobi developer guide.
Do you need a .mobi domain for your site to work on a mobile phone?
Not necessarily. Any website can be designed to work on a mobile phone. All your website needs is a browser detection script that serves a mobile-compatible website if a mobile browser is detected. But the .mobi registry speculates that eventually, mobile phone users will first try to access the .mobi extension of a website they're looking for because they can be safe in the knowledge that it's going to work on their phone.
We were initially very skeptical about .mobi, but after playing around a bit on the mobile simulator we're beginning to like the idea of an extension that we know will display a working website on our mobile phones.
It remains to be seen if .mobi will catch on among the millions of mobile phone users around the world who use their phone to access the Internet, and whether that will happen before most websites become mobile-compatible anyway, a development which could make .mobi largely irrelevant.
How will the launch of Apple's iPhone affect the .mobi extension?