I’ve met the guys from Telnic a few times at this stage.
Admittedly when I first heard about the entire dottel (.tel) project and concept I was more than a little confused. I knew and understood what .mobi was about, so I couldn’t really understand what .tel could bring to the table.
Fortunately I got to meet Jim Reid at ICANN in LA and he was kind of enough to give me a few minutes of his time to demo the .tel system. To say that it blew me away is an understatement.
The concept behind dotTel is sheer genius.
One of the problems we all face is keeping track of people and businesses.
People change their email addresses, get new mobile numbers and change their numbers.
Keeping up to date with the changes is far from easy.
With dotTel individuals and business users will be able to register their names and use them to store their contact details.
Since so much of our communication these days is electronic ie. we rely on our phone’s memory or our computer’s address book and less on paper hard copies, it is a logical step to harness this.
Imagine if you could add micheleneylon.tel to your address book once and never have to update it manually ever again. Why worry about me changing my email address or phone number when your computer or handheld device can do a simple “lookup” for you?
Unlike other domain names that are designed to handle email and websites, the dottel namespace is concerned with storing contact details only.
If you are a multinational for example, then you can easily setup subdomains such as dublin.blacknight.tel etc., to hold the city specific contact details.
Of course you’ll all have to wait a couple of more months before you’ll be able to take advantage of what the guys in Telnic have been cooking up, but the range of applications and plugins that they have on the way is bound to impress.
Imagine if you could harness .tel as a form of openid? What if you could login to multiple systems via your openid style domain instead of worrying about multiple emails, passwords and usernames… The very concept of this gives me goosebumps!
I for one will be signing up for mine as soon as I can!
If you want to see what .tel can do check out celebrity.tel. If you navigate to Hollywood > Jessica Alba you can then see what data they have for her on their system, which is really sweet.
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About the Author: Michele Neylon
7 Comments
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Success will be dependent upon application support of course.
I agree it’s very cool. Personally I hope people realise how synergistic this could be with the mobile web as a whole (and .mobi in particular of course!)
But Michele… your title! .com? Which century is this? 🙂
James
Some of the stuff I saw at ICANN LA was truly impressive and that was nearly a yeat ago. As I’ve said time and time again – a TLD will only be a success if people use it. In the case of .tel the practical usage will either make or break it.
Unfortunately for a LOT of people domains equate with .com – not nice I know, but reality
Michele
James:
You have to forgive Michele, when he was a young lad they were only barely figuring out the Abacus 🙂
hmm sounds like you’d need to me careful with privacy/spam/fraud issues..
Dottel Coming Soon Covered in Sunday Business Post
I’ve mentioned the upcoming launch of .tel a couple of times in recent months.If you’re interested in playing around with .tel domains, then head on over to their “playground”, where you can signup for a free vip.tel subdomain. The VIP…
I fear you may’ve swooning at Jim Reid to fulling appreciate how much of a ridiculous “domain” this is in the present day and age.
8 years ago it was a fantastic idea. Today it’s called Linkedin, Facebook, etc.
http://usefularts.us/2008/11/17/the-tel-domain-launches-in-december-is-it-years-too-late/
Jack
I can’t imagine “swooning” before Jim Reid to be honest.
As for it being too late – I’d have to disagree. Pointing at Facebook and linkedin actually proves my point, as they still use traditional methods to validate logins etc.,
Regards
Michele