Vincent Oberle’s blog
Mobile Presence or the “mobile address” as the universal contact info
On Russell Beattie blog I read about dotMP offering and the .mp (as in mobile phone) domain.
It’s not just a domain, it’s an entire online mobile presence centered around the mobile phone and a short domain name.
Since it’s very new, oberle.mp and even vincent.mp are still available.
So instead of giving out my phone number to my contacts, I give them what Russell calls my “mobile address”, like vincent.mp. My phone number can change, maybe when switching operators, and for sure when changing countries. But my mobile address stays always the same, and it gives people wanting to reach me a page with all my latest contact info: phone number (which may be completely hidden under a “call me” link), email, IM, etc.
Most of the new mobile phones have some sort of browser today. Older ones may only support WAP 1.1, but newer phones even support XHTML. Entering an URL as short as vincent.mp or oberle.org shouldn’t be much longer than entering a phone number (especially to the SMS generation…).
Now will I get a dotMP account? Actually probably not. The price is actually not bad ($50/year) and I like the idea of having vincent.mp, but what bothers me is that I wouldn’t be in control of it. What if dotMP disappears? What if they increase their prices? I cannot go to another host provider like I can with oberle.org. I had this bad experience in the past: I had bought the sub-domain vincent.oberle.com and NetIdentity kept increasing their prices every year until it actually became cheaper to buy my own domain.
As for mobile presence, I can do the same with oberle.org by detecting the device and providing lighter version for mobile device (WordPress has already some plugins for mobile device).
December 4th, 2004 02:50
I’m commenting my own post just to let you know that I’ve added an anti-spam measure (and with this comment I also test it).
You are required to copy a small code, quick and easy. I haven’t had a spam attack yet, but I was guessing it would happen soon,
December 6th, 2004 09:07
I don’t know yet dotMP but I have been interested in your post
cause it’s a kind of very important problem. Long term think I we already know the solution
Open Data with RDF : the best example is FOAF, an RDF vocabulary for describing exactly what you said. Imagine you can suscribe to the FOAF Feed of your friends with a Java FOAFReader :
you will have the first real-time interactive mobile phone Personal Directory that updates when one of your friends change some of his profiles. AND you will be able to agregate all the Application Oriented adress (IM,email,blog,phone, physical adress…) in one specific file accessable on your mobile. For the first time you will contact PEOPLE and not EMAIL, PHONE or IMACCOUNT anymore.