:: Proposal for easier access to Mobile Web (WAP) sites ::
I had some thoughts regarding possible conventions for accessing mobile web sites.
Accessing a mobile web site is cumbersome if a user is expected to enter a URL, like http://www.myusefulapp.com. The entry of URL addresses is not easy on a lot of devices, especially those with numeric keypads. Seeing an advert on a train station billboard that has a convoluted web address is a difficult proposition for mobile users to follow up on; perhaps only the dedicated will try.
Attempts have been made to look at the use of numbers to act as site labels, but thus far all the attempts I have seen (like Bango) are proprietary systems vying for commercial attention. Furthermore, they are not universally known or accepted.
I propose here a simple convention for the mobile device manufacturers and Internet name registries to follow, that would make navigation to WAP sites easier and intuitive. The idea may not be novel, but i have not found it proposed anywhere in my research for my current book "Next Generation Mobile Services".
I summarised the idea in a slide for a new course I am working on ("Mobile Devices"). In essence, we adopt the convention of using domain aliases for our mobile websites, using a new high level domain ".mob". We use numbers for the sites only. So a site http://www.myusefulapp.com would have an alias, for example, of http://www.12213.mob.
The only other convention is that mobile device manufacturers enable these numeric .mob domains to be "dialled" into the phone, causing the browser to open at the appropriate address. I suggest the use of the "@" sign as a prefix. So, I simply dial "@12213" followed by the SEND key, like dialing a phone number, but the browser opens and jumps to http://www.12213.mob which can stay as it is, or be an alias as suggested.
On billboards and in adverts, we simply add the line "dial @12213 for more information on your mobile phone", or however we want to say it. Simple and effective. Over time, the prefix will become widely understood.
[We could consider extensions to the idea that make sub-sites accessible from a single domain. For example, "@12213.1" and "@12213.2" would translate to http://www.12213.mob/1 and http://www.12213.mob/2 and so on. More likely, as we would want to use this for targeted advertising, we would use a parameter, like http://www.12213.mob?param=1 and http://www.12213.mob?param=2. This would be useful for location-specific adverts that do not need to rely on location-finding processes in the mobile network. So an advert for train times could have different post-fixes that map to different timetables on the website.]
8:54:47 PM 
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