Mobile Begs a Question — dotMobi’s WordPress

dotMobi releases fresh WordPress Mobile Pack. Makes you wonder, why do we need the .mobi TLD?

dotMobi, the registry behind the .mobi top level domain name, released the WordPress Mobile Pack this past week. It’s a plugin for Wordpress users that renders your blog well on mobile screens. There are a number of plugins that do this by now (Reglike uses one), but dotMobi’s has more features. Like similar plugins, this tool will identify that a visitor is on a mobile phone or device and render the web page appropriately.

Doesn’t this beg the question, “if we have tools like this, why do we need .mobi anyway”? Well, yes. All you need is domain.com.

When I first heard regarding .mobi a number of years ago I thought it was the one fresh TLD that made sense. What I didn’t know is that technology would mean that creating both a mobile and standard browsing experience using different domain names didn’t make sense. And I think this plugin admits this.

The plugin will let you forward to a different, mobile friendly URL such as domain.mobi or mobile.domain.com if you want. But that isn’t the point of .mobi. I have domainnamewire.mobi, but it forwards to domainnamewire.com and renders a mobile page using a plugin. There’s really no point to having the .mobi version.