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09/21/2005: "Do we need a mobile domain?"

Registrations for the new .mobi domain started a couple of months ago and AppSwing, like may other companies will have no doubt pre-registered. But the question is what is the purpose of such a domain and do we really need one?

According to MTLD, administrator of the top-level domain, the .mobi domain "will serve as a reliable and recognizable mechanism to Internet content and services that are specifically tailored to a mobile experience".  This implies two things: firstly that an organisation is going to publish this domain name on all it's relevant literature alongside any existing domain and secondly that they are going to prepare content suitable for a mobile device.

So I need to publish appswing.mobi alongside all references to appswing.com? Should I not add appswing.tv to that list for any digital TV content? And what about other formats in future? It could be a pretty long list. Surely it would be much better to have one entry point and have the correct content returned depending on the device detected? This is what we have done at AppSwing. Point your mobile device to www.appswing.com and you will get a very different view to if you do so from a desktop browser.

This is achieved using a crude form of the browser auto detection we implement at work. I wrote an article on this on my personal website sometime ago but I will repost it here, this time, along with the asp code too. Using this means that the target user only has to remember one address and companies only have to publish one – surely this is better for everyone?

What about refactoring the content?  Well that's even more difficult. Firstly what is a mobile device? Do we include WAP phones through to Windows CE devices? What level of graphics support should you have? How compliant is the device's browser?

AppSwing's Content Management System (CMS) allows us to create separate templates for different situations and this is exactly what we have done for desktop and mobile browsers. If you don't have such a CMS then this is going to be a difficult exercise to retro fit to an existing website.

I believe that providing properly formatted content for mobile devices is an excellent idea but a new domain suffix is not going to be the answer. What is needed is ways of addressing the different device requirements and reliably detecting these.