.mobi: Smart idea, dumb suffix

Go read this post by my colleague Michal Lev-Ram on the new .mobi top-level domain. I left a brilliant, incisive comment for her which included this excerpt:

I welcome the .mobi domain, and hope to see it achieve widespread usage. It will be nice to know that, whichever website you want to view on your phone, if you just change the TLD to .mobi things will be copacetic. My main complaint is that ".mobi" is probably the stupidest suffix they could have come up with.

I want to elaborate on this from a design perspective: Creating a top-level domain for mobile-device-optimized sites is a great usability decision. Currently many websites have mobile incarnations, but they use inconsistent URLs. For instance, while Google uses http://www.google.com/mobile/, the Onion uses http://mobile.theonion.com. And if you don't know the URL, you can't always find it easily either-- to get to Google's mobile page, you have to click through a pop-up box that doesn't pop up on my Sidekick. As for the Onion-- there is no link on its main page that leads anywhere to the mobile version. In fact, the only reason I know the URL is because it is pre-installed in my Sidekick's bookmarks.

This unfriendliness is a barrier to the usefulness of mobile browsing. Widespread adoption of .mobi will break that barrier down, by introducing simplicity and consistency.

Critics say that well-designed websites should automatically scale themselves to the device on which you're viewing them. I think that's a great idea, but considering that half the websites I visit don't even work properly on Safari-- including the site I'm using to write this post-- I'm not holding my breath.

As for the suffix, which sounds stupid and will launch a thousand dick jokes, I propose that it should be shortened to ".mo". Of course, we'd have to buy it from Macau, but then they can buy ".mac" from Apple.