Is The .mobi Madness Finally Over?
from the that-would-be-nice dept
From back when it was first suggested six or so years ago, we were quite skeptical of the need for a "mobile only" top level domain called .mobi. It wasn't difficult to predict that devices would get better and wireless data services would get better, such that there would be no need for a special separate mobile web -- as everything could easily be delivered via the "regular" web. If anything, like many new TLDs, the whole thing just seemed like a cash grab, because companies would feel obligated to pay up to reserve their .mobi domain names before someone else did. And while .mobi tried to position its offering as something much more than a splinter scaled-down internet, most people pretty quickly realized that it served no reasonable purpose. To be honest, I hadn't even heard much at all about .mobi in a couple years, and as more and more people moved onto phones that could handle full webpages -- or, companies set up their own regular websites to automatically scale down for mobile browsers -- the whole concept seemed to have faded away. MobHappy reports that .mobi has been sold off to the company that also owns the rights to the .info domain -- so both can now live together in uselessness. But, best of all, as Carlo explains:And in case you were wondering, my favorite .mobi site, flowers.mobi -- you remember, the one that was purchased for $200,000 in 2006 and was supposed to be developed into a legit site with "relevant content" -- is still just a parked domain with ads. And it's still not compliant with .mobi's rules for its sites. Big surprise there.
Filed Under: .mobi, domain names, mobile, mobile data, tlds, top level domains
