Well, maybe not… but this doesn’t make much sense to me. Warning, this is a rant about Internet domains, which I wrote a couple weeks ago but forgot to post… so feel free to hit the back button and return to whatever you were doing.

Alright, so basically there’s going to be a new “.mobi” domain specifically tailored for mobile devices like phones or PDAs. These new domains are not any different from “.com”, “.net”, or “.org”…. which is fine. The basic premise behind the .mobi domain is so that mobile devices like phones or PDAs have a ‘special section’ of the Internet designed exclusively for their use. Which seems ok at first glance, but upon closer inspection, the reasoning behind .mobi doesn’t make sense.

First of all, in terms of actual usability, typing “mobi” with a phone keypad is at least 9 key presses. So a domain like “ringtones.mobi” is going to require at least 30 key presses on a standard phone keypad. If the idea is for people to easily get to websites specially tailored for phones (and PDAs), then it should at least be somewhat easy to enter the domain name. A better domain which I’ve seen someone suggest is something like “.pad”. It is 3 times easier to use, since “.pad” is only 3 key presses on a phone. However, this issue could probably be mitigated with some sort of predictive text entry system.

Regardless of the usability issues brought up with the .mobi domain, phones and PDAs in general are reaching a point where they’re becoming mini-computers of sorts in terms of capabilities and functionality. As the feature set (especially screen resolution) increases for phones and PDAs, the need for special ‘lite-version’ of web sites are going to become increasingly rare. Think of it like the recent jump from dial-up connections to fast DSL / cable connections. It doesn’t really make sense to create “highspeed” web sites specifically tailored for high speed internet connections. Practically everyone’s already got a high speed internet these days, so creating two versions of a website is a waste of time and effort. .mobi might’ve been useful 3 or 4 years ago when bandwidth and screen resolution were bigger issues for portable devices, but now… not so much.

Third reason. People are already confused if it a website is supposed to be “dot net”, “dot com”, or “dot whatever”… adding another domain to the mix is only going to make this confusion worse. I find myself increasingly just typing the name of the website I want to goto into Google first, since typing in a domain name that I’m not really sure of could very well easily lead me to some random web site.

And finally, all this talk about the need for a new .mobi domain is really moot, since the need for web sites specifically tailored for phones and PDAs can already solved with existing technologies, like style sheets.

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