I made it out to Toronto’s inaugural Mobile Monday last night. There have been a lot of tech get-togethers sprouting up as of late (BarCamp, DemoCamp, Mesh, Social Tech, etc.), but this one was a bit different. A different crowd, to be sure, and definitely a different venue - it was held at the Fort York Armory building in the Officer’s Mess room, which was packed with military memorabilia.
The format was pretty straightforward - some introductory networking, then a talk, and then some more networking to round out the event, which lasted about 2 hours. I ran into a few people I knew, and met a few other great folks, so I’ll definitely go back next month.
The speaker was Michael O’Farrell from .mobi, and he provided an overview of the initiative. Basically, it’s a “trustmark” TLD that will enforce best practices for web pages that present to mobile devices. If you see a .mobi domain, it should display properly on your phone, and a lot of big players have gotten into it.
I’m having a hard time not being cynical, or at least frustrated, by this project. I know it’s great that a bunch of groups got together and decided on something that could actually be accomplished right now, but it reeks of compromise, and if the future of the mobile web is going to look the same as the current setup (I read some news through my phone the other day. It hurt.), I’m incredibly disappointed.
And that’s my biggest problem with .mobi - today, most PC-based web sites are coded to a core set of browsers, and things like Netscape 4 compatibility doesn’t come up much. If .mobi is going to be a trustmark, it implies that older phones will still work 5 years from now. While Michael mentioned that some countries have a refresh cycle of as little as 6 months per phone, the Canadian market is subsidized by the carriers, with a typical refresh of every 2 or 3 years. I’d hope that the state of mobile data improves at least a little in that time, but we may not be able to see it if everyone’s still coding to the lowest common denominator, effectively turning mobile data into the next Minitel.
I didn’t get a chance to hear if/how this was being addressed, but I hope it is. It’d be a real shame if this initiative just turns into an excuse for phone manufacturers and carriers to stop innovating.
Technorati Tags: Mobile Monday, dotmobi
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