Dotmobi, Verizon, and user-friendly URLs

DotMobi initiative from the very beginning looked to me as not very user-friendly.

Today I have come across a couple of other arguments against it by Verizon.

After a bit more digging, it was amazing to find out an official Dot Mobi Rebuttal by W3C DIWG (dated 2004!!!) stating that the whole idea contradicts Device Independence Principles.

Moreover, while reading an official dot mobi blog:

.mobi-compliant sites, and those sites are coming online daily. Two of our favorites are businessweek.mobi and cnnmoney.mobi.

I could not help but compare the usability of typing "businessweek.mobi" ("2288777744466337777 [wait 2 seconds] 7777933 [wait 2 seconds] 5516 [wait 2 seconds] 666224444" equals 39 key taps) against something like "m.bweek.com" ("6122933 [wait 2 seconds] 33551222666 [wait 2 seconds] 6" equals 19 key taps). Granted, "businessweek" is not exactly mobile phone keypad friendly, but I think there could be better strategies to "mobilize" it. Even using ".net" instead of ".com" will save 2 taps - it would be 5 taps instead of 7 (and no wait between tapping "o" and "m").

Adding "m" as a subdomain designation of "mobility" of the site strikes me as a logical and transparent thing to do (well, it still does violate the Device Independence Principles). Rememberthemik.com guys did it ("m.rmilk.com") and I personally have no trouble remembering it as the name of the mobile side of their application. Compare this to Google's "google.com/reader" for regular and "google.com/reader/m" for mobile. Hmm..., now it does look kind of obvious, but believe it or not, I could not remember the Google Reader Mobile URL today while waiting for an appointment. Why not change it to m.greader.com?



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