Barack Obama Goes .Mobi
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
Presumptive Democrat nominee uses .mobi for mobile web site.
United States Presidential candidate Barack Obama is leveraging the mobile web to get his message out. His campaign is using ObamaMobile.mobi. And unlike most popular .mobi domain names, it actually resolves to a .mobi domain rather than just forwarding to a mobile version of a .com we site.
The site does a good job providing interactivity despite mobile limitations. For example, it provides a text response number and lets users receive a whitepaper about Obama’s mobile plan via e-mail (since downloading it on the phone wouldn’t work well).
The only unfortunate news in this for .mobi fans is that this is a long and poor domain name. Obama.mobi forwards to an Information.com page. Even worse, ObamaMobile.com is owned by a New York firm. ObamaMobile.com was registered prior to the Barack Obama campaign picking up its domain name.
According to the dotMobi blog, Republican candidate John McCain doesn’t have a mobile site. JohnMcCain.mobi is registered by a company called “Campaign Solutions”. McCainMobile.mobi isn’t registered yet, but McCainMobile.com is registered by the same company that owns ObamaMobile.com.
Tags: barack obama, john mccain, mobi
“Even worse, ObamaMobile.com is owned by a New York firm.”
Andrew, I know it seems to defy conventional wisdom but you don’t need the com to build a .mobi. It’s now clear to me that Obama is indeed the candidate of change
Ah yes, but let’s see how many visits the .com gets…
What the heck does “.mobi” mean?
Stay objective … naysayers!
Incredible that even this news can be used for .mobi bashing..
Does it hurt ?
Nice move to reach voters, no politician can ignore this – they can join the list at
http://greatleaders.mobi/links.html
can only be HUGE news for .mobi investors, only a fool would suggest otherwise. just goes to show .com is the tld of choice still for cybersquatters! lol
‘word’ mobile cannot be seen as a bad choice imho, the election is near and they won’t have time to try to win obama.mobi etc even IF they could win back, so they went with an educated choice. main point being they went with a .mobi. However hard you try to paint it negatively otherwise.
wonder what big news is next? hoho
After rethinking about it, I think not being able to get Obama.mobi is worse that ObamaMobile.com being owned by someone else. “Mobile.mobi” is redundant.
Come on Andrew, you can do it… admit this is very good news for .mobi. You can stop finding what is wrong with this, it’s ok.
It’s certainly good for .mobi, but I wouldn’t call it a huge deal.
A presidential candidate uses a .mobi and domainers don’t think that is a big deal? I would have to say it is a very big deal. Why he doesn’t WIPO his own name is beyond me, but maybe he doesn’t want the bad press.
[...] The site does a good job providing interactivity despite mobile limitations. For example, it provides a text response number and lets users receive a whitepaper about Obama’s mobile plan via e-mail (since downloading it on the phone wouldn’t work well). More… [...]
“The only unfortunate news in this for .mobi fans is that this is a long and poor domain name.”
That’s actually great news for .mobi. The fact that such a “long and poor” domain was their only option in .mobi, yet they still went with a .mobi, is very telling.