Comments on: Opera CEO says DotMobi is a ‘total waste of time’

By: Joseph Greenstein

Joseph Greenstein — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 09:44:10 +0000

I couldn’t agree more! Dot mobi is an utter waste of time unless you are a registrar. If you are a registrar, it’s a dream come true. What a great opportunity to defraud the masses by pedalling what will become yet another worthless third rate extension.

The only upside is that the vast majority of those that will get conned by the dot mobi fraud will be semi-literate, stay-at-home, unemployed, retarded domain name speculators. These are people who make the net less than what it otherwise would/could be and don’t deserve a great deal of sympathy anyhow.

Let’s face it, who the hell needs another stupid (and in this case, obscure) extension to remember!!!!!!!

By: IceArdor

IceArdor — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 03:46:20 +0000

I must say, I don’t like it when I go to a website, realize it’s not the right one, and then rememeber that “oh right, it’s not .com, it’s .net” And then proceed to the proper domain. It’s annoying, and I don’t really need yet another to memorize.

Ideally, choosing .mobi allows phone carriers to continue to send us our content at low-bitrates, instead of using technology that already exists to make phones nearly as powerful as computers. The technology exists, the industry is just holding back because they’re greedy and want money. Forcing .com will force the tech industry to upgrade our phones.

It’s like this. You’ve got a broken leg. You can choose to either get medieval crutches, or you can get a hovercraft that allws you to fly. The only difference in this analogy is that the high-tech phones already exist. Wireless carriers are just unwilling to feed us premium bandwidth.

DotMobi is a waste.

By: Ben Buchanan

Ben Buchanan — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 03:35:58 +0000

Quite apart from whether it would be useful, I doubt I’d ever take the content seriously if it was hosted at “dot mobby”. Just as “dot biz” sounds utterly unprofessional to me and “dot info” just begs the question of what other websites contain if it’s not information.

Besides all that, whatever happened to protocols? eg. http://example.com, ftp://example.com, wap://example.com… If phone browsers are using http then they need to start supporting the handheld media type and stop complaining

By: ME

ME — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 19:03:36 +0000

So when does operawatch.fridge go live?.

By: tomc

tomc — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 00:55:26 +0000

Thank you Opera for exposing one the biggest scams to plague this web, sponsored by all the “innovative and smart mobility companies”.

A few other notes:

-Tim Berners-Lee spoke out against .mobi.
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD

-they only recently supported WURLF, after the registrations. http://dev.mobi

-their emualtor was misleading.
http://mobhappy.com/blog1/2006/08/24/whats-mobi-playing-at-now/

-.mobi was not the first mobile TLD. http://dot.mp

I will never visit a .mobi domain.

By: Mopey

Mopey — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 23:58:28 +0000

@media handheld{
}

By: ResearchWizard

ResearchWizard — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 23:43:20 +0000

Sorry, I messed the first source link, here the (hopefully) correct version: Intelligent Infrastructure Opera Everywhere

By: ResearchWizard

ResearchWizard — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 23:40:23 +0000

From the FORBES interview with Jon von Tetzchner:

What's the weirdest device Opera is on? The bar code reader is a fairly special kind of device. If you visit IBM's (nyse: IBM - news - people ) labs in Austin, Texas, you'll see us on the refrigerator.

Is Opera working on a fridge browser together with SUN or IBM or both? source: http://www.forbes.com/intelligentinfrastructure/2006/11/08/opera-firefox-mozilla-tech-intel-cx_df_1109opera.html, see also previous article on Opera Watch

By: Kc4

Kc4 — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 21:08:38 +0000

I like how the sci-fi article says “have you used Opera lately?” Well most of us except for Heathen Dan have in commenting here.

By: AG

AG — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 18:30:11 +0000

By: Heathen Dan

Heathen Dan — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 15:20:37 +0000

It’s unbelieveably silly to propose a new domain just for mobile phone content. The web should be device independent as it is platform and browser independent. I can see why MS (never cared for standards and interoperability) and Nokia (helps cellphone sales) would push for .mobi, but Google?

WML is already a failure (good mobile browsers like Opera’s can do html just fine), now they want to make an entire domain WAP/WML friendly? *shakes head*

By: Adrian Lee

Adrian Lee — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 14:04:44 +0000

I’ve been saying exactly the same thing in the office and on some forums.
5 years ago, perhaps there would have been a use for it, but now, there is only very limited short term viability.

Obviously Opera Mini is being used by a reasonable number of people, has helped increase peoples use of the internet from their phones, and that’s only going to rise as more people find the software, and presumaly other companies will build similar software to enable normal websites to display properly.

They’ve introduced .mobi at a pivotal point in mobile/browser technology making it redundant before it even gets going.

By: SuitCase

SuitCase — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 13:28:09 +0000

Good call, I think! It is a pretty absurd idea for everyone except the registrars.