ResearchBuzz

In case you didn’t notice, the Internet has a new top-level domain. .mobi is for sites which support mobile devices, not for sites which are All Made of Stars. You can see the Wikipedia article on the .mobi timeline and companies who supported it here; I got curious about what sites were already using it (.mobi has been open for general registration for less than two weeks) and did some experimenting with Google.

The way to get page counts for any top-level domain in Google is to run this query: inurl:tld site:tld, where site is the top level domain for which you’re searching. Therefore I ran inurl:mobi site:mobi, and got over 42,000 results.

(Actually the inurl: site: trick will work for an amusingly-large number of text strings. See inurl:montypython site:montypython for a fun example.)

I didn’t recognize the top few results — companies involved in the development of .mobi and .mobi-related technology. Then I saw several companies I recognized in new .mobi formats — BusinessWeek.mobi, CityGuide.mobi, and several .mobi sites from mobile phone companies (duh.)

A few more generic sites were also available (diabetic.mobi) and oh look, there’s live.mobi, Windows Live in spanking new .mobi format. However there must be something I’m missing, otherwise the nice live.mobi site wouldn’t be giving me the giant Nextel ad. (All the other .mobi sites I looked at were clearly designed for cell phones and other small-screen devices.)

Towards the bottom of the first page for Google search results, if you’re getting 100 results on a page, you’ll see a square ton of parked .mobi pages, including skype.mobi, jobs4u.mobi, and one that’s really planning ahead — www.2012londonolympics.mobi/ .

If you’re interested to watch how a newly-released TLD is growing, put in a Google alert for inurl:mobi site:mobi and watch how the numbers change and see what domains get parked (and how quickly Google indexes ‘em!) Hmm.. I wonder if ImAVeganAndMyNameIs.mobi is available?

It’s interesting; I have very little use for a portal page on my computer’s Web browser. But on my cell phone — that’s a different matter entirely! Google has recently made it possible to customize a home page for your cell phone and take it with you; check it out at http://www.google.com/ig/cp.

If you’ve ever used Google’s custom home page form you know how it works; there’s a page with modules on it which you can click and drag around. In the case of the mobile phone customization the regular home page is on the right with modules on it. On the left is a picture of a phone screen. Click an drag the modules you want onto the phone screen. I don’t see a way to explore more modules to add to the phone; is what’s on the screen it? (Modules there include weather, top stories, New York Times headlines, etc.)

Once you’ve got the phone screen the way you want it (it’ll expand vertically as you add more modules, which is really odd, but ignore that) you can get to it by doing one of two things. First way is to go to http://google.com/ig on your cell phone’s browser. That’ll prompt you to log into your Google account and get to your personalized page.

The second way is to give Google your cell phone number and your carrier, and Google will send you the URL of your phone! Which is actually http://google.com/ig, so it’s the same thing as typing in the URL directly except you save a few seconds.

I would really enjoy a portal page on my phone. I would enjoy it a lot more if there were more modules available than the ones I was looking at; surely that isn’t all there is to it?

Topix.net announced last week that they have released Topix.net/ZIP, a quick way to get local news via your mobile phone.

It’s simple to use; just enter Topix.net/ZIP, where ZIP is your zip code. Here’s one you can try from your cell phone: http://topix.net/90210.

If you try this URL from a regular browser, the URL will redirect to Topix’ regular page of news about Beverly Hills California. However, if you access this URL from a cell phone you will get a compressed page of headlines and news with good-sized summaries and clickable links to the full story. I found it loaded very quickly on my phone, though occasionally when I tried to link to a specific story I would have some trouble (I blame this more on the story source than Topix.)

Topix isn’t always perfect about story selection. One of the current Raleigh area stories is about two women who were killed when an inflatable artwork blew away; however, this happened in Durham County, England, not Durham, North Carolina. These errors are few enough and obvious enough however that I’ve bookmarked a few pages on my phone for when I need a quick news fix.