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%

honey the kids won't speak...

I keep hearing reference to american teenagers doing over 1000 messages a month. I kept readily dismissing it as hyperbole. Other work mates also could not believe it.

In the carpool this morning I was relaying this information to a teenager girl's dad. He was not surprised at all by the statistic of 1,000 messages a month on average and said he had seen a room full of girls sitting together texting their friends and each other for an hour without a word being said.

Nielsen puts the number at 1700 messages per month for 13-17 years olds.

So I've done a quick search and there are a number of different studies that do suggest 1,000-2,000 messages per month is the average. And an average of 1,500 messages per month in Australia and New Zealand for the same age group.

That's an average of receiving or sending one text message every 10-20 minutes of their waking hours (assuming they sleep 9 hours a day).

This young lass did 14,528 text messages a month: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/13/text_message_marathon/

"mum y r u gvng me a hrd time?"

"coz u neva spk 2 me nemore!"

Millennials and optimism.

According to a recent study done by Pepsi (Pepsi Optimism Project), Millennials – those people born between 1980 and 1990 – are confident that 2009 will bode well for them. They also spend more time enjoying life than worrying about it and this group is most optimistic about their overall well-being and relationships with friends and family. Other findings include:
•  74% find that supporting causes make them feel more optimistic.

•  77% of Millennials report having a strong sense of optimism about their careers.

•  95% make positive associations when they think of the word “change,” associating it with “progress” (78%), “hope” (77%) and “excitement” (72%).

These numbers are great, but the most interesting and perhaps the most expected is their correlation to the recent election. According to the survey, 67% of Millennials say that the election of Barack Obama is making them feel optimistic about the future of the country. While Millennials may seem naive and less experienced (in the job market), they represent the kind of optimistic attitude that we'll all need to recover. They're not jaded by hiring and firing practices in AdLand and, in my opinion, are who I'd hire right now in the hopes that they're sentiments pervade my agency and my clients'.