Which is better… domain.mobi, or mobi.domain.com?

February 23, 2008 by James
Filed under: Internet Marketing, Rants and Raves 

Implementing a dotMobi website is currently popular. The marketers of this world are saying that your domain (brand) plus the dot-mobi extension tells the mobile user that your site will work on their pda, iPhone, Blackberry etc.

But here’s what I’m not understanding… why register yet another domain, incurr more admin costs and other overhead when you can simply create a subdomain for your site like this:

http://mobi.your-domain.com

And while I’m thinking about it, you can encode the website to detect the browser and redirect to a mobile friendly format automatically - like many large sites already do (Google does it…)

In fact if you type http://www.google.mobi they redirect you to http://www.google.com/mobi and tell you they’ve set up a special section of their site called http://mobile.google.com

Bottom line, the whole “dot-mobi” idea is cool, but not really a requirement when you think about it. Either use a sub domain called mobi or mobile and prepend it on your already well-known dot-com site…

And here’s my final thought on the subject, what about the Internet’s primary design requirement of device independence. This dot-mobi concept is essentially trying to fork or split the net into two versions: the current version and a new mobile version.

This approach is evidently not in keeping with the original vision of the net, and as a former software developer, I know it’s very bad ‘mojo’ to create and support two versions of anything!

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