14 DAY TRIAL // Google is very keen on mobile, it's been working on building mobile alternatives for all of its products and is already seeing quite a lot money coming from mobile ads. No surprise then that it wants everyone to keep up and build mobile sites that its Android phones can use and its advertising can reach.
Google is working on GOMO, what appears to be a tool for creating mobile compatible versions of a website. The tool is not live yet, but the website is, even though it's not working.
Fusible uncovered the howtogomo.com domain and the related howtogomo.org and howtogomo.net, which are all registered to Google. But the domains had been inactive until very recently.
The site is titled Access Restricted and trying to do anything with it at the time requires a password. Needless to say, there's no way of getting one, unless you work for Google.
There's not much to go on, but the focus of the site clearly seems to be on optimizing for mobile use. Google already offers a way of catering to mobile users via the Google Mobile Optimizer in the Webmaster Tools, but that comes with a very limited set of options and capabilities.
The new tool could be a lot better, creating websites that you'd actually want to use.
Google already has experience converting sites for mobile use, granted, only those it hosts itself via Blogger and Sites.
Google debuted a set of mobile-optimized templates a few months ago for Blogger, giving users the option of presenting a mobile version of their blog to users. Of course, Google has full control over the look and feel of Blogger, so the move was painless.
It went further with Sites, it automatically converts the user created websites into mobile friendly ones. It later introduced a way of creating a mobile version of your site in the same WYSIWYG editor that Sites uses.