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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