where does the mobile internet live?

please tweet and/or post this image!

In a meeting today we were joking around about mobile URL's that are cool and URL fails.

We recently registered m.ob.ly from libya to host all of our client's sites. We think that m.ob.ly is a cool mobile domain.

wap.site.com, on the other hand. Uncool. Very 1999.

I recently ran a co-ordinated, perl scripted and thorough investigation of the mobile capabilities of the top 100 most trafficked North American websites and the top 100 brands. Specifically, when they had any mobile presence at all, where did the company point the user? How many of them are cool? Well, a lot!

What's the most popular mobile site URL?

m.site.com was used by almost half (39%) of all mobile internet sites, for instance:

• m.yahoo.com
• m.youtube.com
• m.myspace.com
• m.bing.com
• m.toyota.com
• m.disney.go.com
• m.hp.com
• m.bing.com
• m.cnn.com
• m.flickr.com

mobile.site.com was next most popular with 14.4% of mobile site URLs:

• mobile.microsoft.com
• mobile.mcdonalds.com
• mobile.about.com
• mobile.nytimes.com

gibberish
the next most popular url format, coming in at 13.5% of all sites, was a bunch of gibberish in the mobile url, like:

• Amazon:  www.amazon.com/gp/aw
  
• MSN: sports.mobile.msn.com
• Lexus: www.lexus.com/lexus/jsp/pub/mobile
• Armani: apps.netbiscuits.com/57690/armaniExchange

This is really a problem because many mobile operators use nasty transcoders which rely on the format of the URL to determine whether the content is a mobile site or not. Without a specific mobile URL, the perfectly formatted mobile content could be mangled through a transcoder.

iphone.site.com
The iphone is so popular that many pubishers and brands are making custom sites especially for it. Typically if the publisher is building an iphone.site.com site, then they've also built another specific mobile site. For instnace, m.facebook.com and iphone.facebook.com

.mobi is used by less than 4% of brands and publishers
What was really surprising to me out of this study is that the .mobi domain is so unpopular. In fact, of the 200 brands and top sites I checked, very few of them had even bothered to register their .mobi domain. The .mobi top-level-domain seems overrun by domain squatters. Oh well... m.site.com works for me!

Having a mobile site and not using it? Priceless.

Having a mobile website and then not automatically redirecting to it from your primary site? WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!?

I'm talking about YOU yelp, and YOU linkedin, and YOU too nokia. Come on guys, get your act together and make sure your primary website redirects to the mobile site that you've spent hundreds of thousands of $ building. Here's a tip, they're here m.yelp.com, m.linkedin.com and mobile.nokia.mobi.

Net net?

m.site.com is most popular.

custom URLs for iphone.site.com, m.site.com and android.site.com very cool.

Not having a mobile website at all is understandable for some but not the top 100 brands and top 100 publishers.

Having a mobile site and not using it? Ummm.

For those interested in the gory details:
m.site.com 39.42%
mobile.site.com 14.42%
nothing sensible 13.46%
iphone.site.com 6.73%
nochange 6.73%
site.mobi 3.85%
site.com/mobile 1.92%
site.com/m 1.92%
site.com/iphone 1.92%
site.com/wap 0.96%
wireless.site.com 0.96%
wap.site.com 0.96%
wapp.site.com 0.96%
site.com/mobi 0.96%

Twitter on TIME Magazine Cover

"I've written this week's TIME cover story about how Twitter is changing the way we live--and showing us the future of innovation. Buy a copy!"

I think it's significant that TIME chose iPhone as the Twitter platform. If you don't see strong relationships between Twitter and mobile, put it this way, you don't blog on your mobile but you tweet on your mobile. And you know why.

By the way, Oprah has been on Twitter for a while too. (Visit Oprah's Twitter)

"It's entirely possible that three or four years from now, we'll have moved on. But the key elements of the Twitter platform will persevere. Every major channel of information will be Twitterfied."

"Twitterfy" is another new English verb.

"Although Twitter trails over Web giants, its explosive growth over the past year means it could soon catch up"

1,298% growth? I blinked and squinted at the number (literally).

"Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from "passed links" at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand:it's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorkers article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit."

"In short, the most facinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it".

P.S. I took all of the photos at Borders and had a second thought and bought a copy.:P

Read more...

How Twitter will change the way we live.

Should I charge for an iPhone app, or use ads?

It turns out that if you want to make money then yes. The CPM (cost per thousand ad impressions) on an iPhone app is so low that you're better of charging.  Do the ads networks really value mobile app inventory at the same rate as websites?  Or is this a bit of cream for the networks advertisers at this early stage of the app environment?  Of course if you're a brand wanting to connect with your customers there's no doubt that you shouldn't charge.  However this presentation above should help to show that you'll get most of the use of the app in the first day,so make it compelling.

TwitterBerry.

TwitterBerry is awesome. Created by Orangatame Software, TwitterBerry is a native mobile app for posting updates to Twitter. It works over the data network, so it doesn't require SMS.

Supported devices:

• BlacKBerry Storm (garbage)
• BlacKBerry Bold  
• BlackBerry Curve (8300, 8310, 8320, 8330) Series
• BlackBerry 8800 Series
• BlackBerry Pearl (8100, 8110, 8120, 8130, 8220, 8230) Series
• BlackBerry 8700 Series
• BlackBerry 7130 Series
• BlackBerry 7100 Series
• BlackBerry 7200 Series
• BlackBerry 7520