More domains, more search

The CTO of dotmobi, James Pearce, nipped in last week for a chat with a bunch of us journalists at IWR towers, and very illuminating it was too.

If you haven't heard of the .mobi top level domain, then you're not alone, by the way. Launched late last year, it's intended to kick start mobile content on the web.

By this point, I imagine anyone areound at the time of the dotcom bubble will be snorting into their soy lattés. The whole idea of the mobile internet was a central theme to the bursting of the bubble back at the turn of the century, with any number of companies pimping improbable WAP sites, applications and the rest. In the meantime, BT told us that Cellnet (now O2) was opening up the mobile internet, and phone.com was making a lot of hoopla about mobile apps, as well. The crowning height of hubris was a  kludging of Amazon's API into a WAP page so that, if you had about 20 minutes, flexible thumbs and infinite patience, you could buy a book with your mobile phone.

However, things have changed. GPRS and 3G have rolled out to
acceptable levels of coverage (the former around five years behind one
Vodafone PR person's prediction of April 2001), flat rate data tariffs
have finally made it, RIM has introduced some decently clever devices,
Symbian has made it onto phones, and screens have got better. People
still seem to avoid the mobile internet, but at least they actually believe it exists nowadays.

Dotmobi's funding is from a variety of sources, but two stick out.
Microsoft and Google have invested some money, apparently, and both are
doing so for the benefit of search. This is because, generally, people
using a mobile phone are looking for different things than people
sitting behind a PC at a desk. Pearce suggested a mobile user - they
might go to Coca-Cola's site to find the nearest Coke machine, rather
than to look for offers or information on sports spoinsored by the
drinks giant.

I'll be honest at this point; I still have no idea whether dotmobi
will succeed at its stated aims of improving mobile usage on the
internet. telecoms applications are notoriously difficult to predict,
and telecoms companies are, frankly, dreadful at predicting what
customers want to use. SMS was a communications back channel for
engineers, not a way for people to send each other messages for less
than the price of a phone call.

At the moment, a straw poll of people in the office I work in
suggests that mobile email and mapping are both popular applications.
Surfing the web isn't a popular application, however. People seem to
like the BBC's news site, which has succeeded despite not having a mobile TLD.

However, the likes of Microsoft and Google
will want to make search easier for mobile users. Google has put a lot
of effort into getting onto mobile phone owners' home page - it's
succeeded with T-Mobile, and a few others. It's in the best interests
of search companies to find and provide content that suits mobile users.

But the key here is applications, not content.
Dotmobi is laudable, and the company 's site has some great tools for
ensuring content on your site will be easily read by mobile browsers,
but mobile usage is still about application and not content. As soon as
content becomes useful and helpful - and I have to say that Google's mail app is one of the most regularly used programs on my E60 - then the TLD will become truly useful.