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.

Top 10 Mobile Web Sites in March 2009

MocoSpace remains in front with several billion PI's per month. I wonder how long it will take for Twitter and Facebook to make it on the list. The full data is available at MarketingCharts.

The Mobile Internet is Awesome.

The Mobile Internet is Awesome.

View more presentations from Conrad Lisco.

Another carrier breaking the mobile web

I have heard of another carrier Orange in Europe, who have decide that they can help the uptake of the mobile web by automatically compressing every image that downloaded via 3G to make it faster. As you can see from the result above (compressed version on the left) it may be faster but the quality is alot worse.

When are the carriers going to finally stop interferring and just leave the mobile web alone.

More information can be found at : http://jbablog.com/2009/03/rotten-3g-by-orange-in-poland/

Mobile Awesomeness

I recently stumbled upon the site Mobile Awesomeness, a site dedicated to "big time awesome for the small screen," and brought to life by the folks over at Brightwurks. Needless to say, it's a pretty awesome site. They have a huge gallery of mobile sites out there and let visitors rate them on a scale of 1-5 'thumbs up'.

They also have a page of Mobile Web Resources - a great place to get information, recommendations and best practices for the mobile web. 

It's one of the best resources I've seen in awhile to see what's going on in the mobile web, so I suggest you check it out!

Who's on the mobile web? A quarter of the internet... that's who

 

In a recent report from the Kelsey Group, an amazing stat jumped out... "Currently there are 54.5 million mobile Internet users in the United States, representing 25 percent of online users"... that's a quarter of all US internet users now on the mobile web.

See the full release here.