We recently posted an article here on DomainNews titled "Is Dot-mobi Doomed?", posted by our editor David Goldstein, on Friday, August 29th 2008. Consequently we were contacted by Vance P. Hedderel, Director, PR and Communications for dotMobi (mTLD Top Level Domain Limited) who offered the following rebuttal to the article we printed...
"It's interesting to me that a group of people decided to discuss the future of the .mobi domain yet declined to respond to requests by dotMobi to participate in that session. After all, there's a reason two of the top search engines providers -- Google and MSN -- invested in dotMobi, and I suspect we know a thing or two about SEO and mobility that the panelists aren't aware of -- especially judging from the write ups about the event I've seen. Some of the more glaring points I've read in reports about the session are:
1. "dotMobi never took off."
As of May 2008, more than 1,000,000 .mobi domains have been registered. Based on crawls of all mobile-specific and mobile-friendly sites on the 80,000,000-plus .com / .org / .net / .mobi domains, we saw approximately 25,000 mobile sites in November 2007. Repeating that crawl in July 2008, we saw approximately 190,000 sites. The majority of those are .mobi. While that very strong increase shows the growing interest in the mobile web, it’s obviously a fraction of the total number of web sites that will **not** work on a mobile phone. This is why the .mobi domain is relevant for end users – they can know that content is designed to work on their mobile devices.
2. "[.mobi] isn't need today thanks to devices like the iPhone and Skyfire."
dotMobi is a fan of the iPhone in that it has made many people aware of the possibilities of using the web on a mobile phone, and we’ve discussed that several times on http://blog.mobi. Also, I think Laura Reis has captured some interesting arguments on .mobi and the iPhone in her recent piece at http://ries.typepad.com/ries_blog/2008/07/iphone-3g-totally-new.html. The presenters would have benefited greatly from reading these thoughts.
3. "[.mobi] is rarely ideal for search engine optimization."
As I noted above, dotMobi knows a thing or two about mobility and mobile search. We even built a purely mobile search engine (see find.mobi). We've also wrapped a bit of that knowledge into an article on our mobiThinking site (see http://mobithinking.com/best-practices/mobile-seo-best-practices).
As a company, dotMobi is always willing to talk about why .mobi makes sense in any arena, especially in one where dotMobi can also represent the viewpoint of two market leaders like Google and MSN. While I'm sad that we were rebuffed in asking to participate, I'm sadder for the session audience who received incomplete and inaccurate information.
– Vance"
For more information or additional comments please contact:
Vance P. Hedderel
Director, PR and Communications
dotMobi (mTLD Top Level Domain Limited)
vhedderel@dotmobi.mobi
+1.703.485.5563
Source: Submission by mTLD to DomainNews.com on September 15th, 2008 - Posted by Roland G. Buck - Chief Editor