Saturday, May 17, 2008

Mobile URLs in Japan

I have read article about mobile URLs and how they use them in Japan. I recommend you to read it.

It looks like, that in Japan, they solved problem which every mobile startup is solving and that is what kind of url they should use for their project.

For Cotopia, we choose to use www.cotopia.com for web version and cotopia.mobi for mobile version of the site.

There is no problem with our web url, but we had a lot of arguing about our mobile URL.

Other possibilities were using old wap.cotopia.com, which we used from 2003 to 2007 or new schema, which is starting to be adopted by big USA internet sites like Facebook or Google, which is m.domain.com, in our case it would be m.cotopia.com.

We decided, that wap domain is not good anymore. People generally don't like wap and there is not "cool" effect in wap anymore.

So our "fight" was whether to use m.cotopia.com or cotopia.mobi.

.mobi was just starting and I was thinking that it makes total sense to use it. It looked like, that .mobi initiative will try to help all .mobi startups and they will push it hard. For some reasons, this process is much slower than I was thinking it would be. Today, still nobody knows, what .mobi domain is. If I tell somebody to go to cotopia.mobi , they usually ask me if they should write www in front of it.

From this perspective, I think .mobi domain is good for projects, which have no .com domain.
If your website have www.domain.com, put your mobile version to m.domain.com. It's cheaper and easier to explain.

Or you may try the Japanese approach from the article and let me know how it goes.