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Is It Time For .tel?
Vitaly Friedman writes "ICANN, the body responsible for creating top-level domains, is considering a new one. Conceived as a way to easily manage contact information in an age where many people have numerous contact numbers, the proposed .tel TLD would allow individuals and companies to keep all of their contact information in an easily accessible location. Companies would get companyname.tel while individuals would be able to register firstnamelastname.tel." This idea has been kicked around for quite a while; one of the question is the whole name-space collision issue. For instance, there's me and then there's other me. Lemme tell how strange it is getting fan mail for country music stars.
This is way better than .biz, which I can only guess that they just banged out without thinking twice about.
It's pretty fun to watch ICANN and the domain industry constantly come up with new "specific-purpose" domains, which upon release sell to absolutely anyone and everyone regardless of the actual category of the site. Apart from the actually restricted ones like .gov, .mil, and .edu, sites' categories have had little to nothing to do with their domain extensions for ages now.
.com actually meant a for-profit business, or when every .org was an organization of some kind?
Who still remembers when a
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Of course that's another chance for ICANN, VeriSign and domain name resellers to cash in without much of a hassle, due to DNS' easily extensible and robust nature - however, much like .info and .name, this TLD presumeably won't be a big hit. .com, .net and maybe .org only, plus maybe their country's TLD.
The problem with all these newly introduced TLDs is that they don't ring a bell for the average joe on teh intarweb, since most casual users are familiar with
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
When is everyone going to stop assuming that issuing new TLDs is going to solve all their problems? What, is it impossible for people to update the contact information on their personal web sites now, or has their been some fundamental change to HTML/XML of which I am unaware?
This is a dumb idea. I won't even touch the personal namespace problem, which should be evident to anyone with a brain. The only way that would work is if everyone had five names. You know there are going to be squabbles over company names, as old and new companies jockey for the .tel names that offer them the best marketing bang for the buck.
Need a place to put your contact information? Try www.contact.your-web-site-name-here.whatever. ICANN needs to stop polluting the TLD pool.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
This may pose a problem with the 526,000+ people sharing the name Michael Smith.
Or the people who share names with companies. Or the people who share names with each other. There will be collisions. This plan will not work for its stated purpose. However, its stated purpose and its real purpose most likely are not the same. Odds are, this is just another plan to make more money for the registrars by opening up a new land rush of domain name registrations.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Are doomed to reinvent it.
So lets see, we create a whole separate _TLD_ that people/companies must register, just so people can have www.foo.tel, which is essentially a directory of who's who at www.foo.com?
This is completely idiotic. How about "finger @foo.com | grep -i 'your name'" Obviously wrap it into some kind of GUI, or do something as simple as a web front end to an existing in-house address book?
Geesh. Next someone will invent the ".mail" TLD, which is the address for foo.com, that you use to send email to. what about ".web" ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
.tel provides nothing that currently isn't available right now- Companies have contact pages with the information that you need to fax, phone, or email them your enquiries, people have their email and myspace pages, and all that I can see a .tel page doing is a refer URL forwarding.
I see this as another $35 per year revenue for the domain registers.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I don't get why an individual would want to buy a domain name and server space just to park their contact information. Are they aiming for the business individual? Why couldn't I just put it on my regular website? I don't see the point in getting a domain name for this. Like the artical stated, this is overkill for something that is already done. Search engines already find contact information for companies that have it on their regular site. Plus if a company did do this it would take a while before the search engines would be it up. Googles sandbox time is like 6 months, so for about 6 months people wouldn't be able to find a companies contact info unless they found it through the company site.
Can I bum a sig?
companyname.tel is so much better than companyname.com/contact.html!
Man, I'm in the wrong business; if only I could get paid for coming up with ideas like this...
It's official. Most of you are morons.
James is the most common first name.
Smith is the most common last name.
I don't see anything that guarantees they're the most common combination.
The domain name .me.uk was originally design for firstname.lastname.me.uk but I only know of one site to use it, and that's a big torrent site. This domain name is pointless except for making companies buy yet another TLD, which really isn't required.
Why not:
ur-domain.ur-tld/contact.ext !?!?!?!?!?
Whooooo the simplicity....
"You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm." - S. G. Colette
Why do we need even more top level domains? So that companies must register yet another TLD to keep people from claiming pepsi.tel?
.net, but of course we had to buy the .com because everyone types it... and the .org just in case... and what's this I hear about .co and .biz??? (comment from the PHB)
In the minds of the vast majority of internet users, the extension is an afterthought at best. The company I work for is a
Real progress would be in moving to simplify things; less top level domains. How about just one for governments, one for schools, and one for absolutely everything else?
How can you say that a
I have always believed it be a law that there be a new "META" tag in HTML. Something of the sorts
Then
I am not in favor of censorship in any way but I am totally in favor of the choice of individuals and the choice of parents to protect their children. Censorship is bad but individual control is good.
Don't try to use Slashdot to prove to others how smart you are.
Excuse me? I can't believe what I just read... what exactly are you doing? Sounds like you're doing just that, to me...
You see, actually, it's a public forum, and people will use it for whatever the fuck they please. Get it? That is, I (not the original poster) will use "actually" wherever I see it fit; and there's nothing to stop me, just like there's nothing stopping you from being an incessant asswipe and posting hypocritical bullshit.
Incidentally, I thought it was very legit use of the word. Here's another example:
Poster A: "You are a troll."
Poster B: "Actually, (A)*(B)!0_- is a troll."
See? Poster A never claimed you weren't a troll, yet still made legitimate use of the word "actually".
If you have nothing better to do than scorn innocent posters for tiny little nitpicky shit, particularly when your criticisim isn't even correct, then don't post. That is, mind your own advice.
Fucking dirtbag.
while individuals would be able to register firstnamelastname.tel.
.NAME was for?
Isn't this what
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
I could see a way this would work. Whenever you ask for your namelastname.tel or mycompanyname.tel you won't get that domain for you, instead you would have to fill in a form in which you write a brief description of who you or your company are and write down your contact information, including your real website.
This way, if I need to contact with some person or company, I'll type itsname.tel on my browser, and I will search for the person I'm looking for, so all people with the same name could get the chance of being found in itsname.tel.
I don't see how it could be otherwise.
First, the phone company already knows that the best way to index phone number is by soundex, to avoid massive problems caused by the fact that many people don't know the correct spellings of their friends' and associates' names. And they certainly aren't sounding like this will be the first domain indexed by soundex.
Second, it's unlikely that domain ownership will be a prerequisite to having a phone number. I don't think they could sell that. (In fact, they might realistically make more by saying they were going to give away the domain with your name and invent a service called ... hmmm, let's see... how about the "unlisted domain" where the customer pays money to keep from being locatable.)
Third, phone numbers have the virtue of being uncorrelated with a name. That's what makes them resolvable in ambiguity--they act as a cross-check to make sure you got it right. When you can't quite remember a number and think it's either 555-1234 or 555-1235 and then check information to find the first is for "Sam Smith" and the second for "Alex Jones", there's little doubt how to resolve things. But if you thought the number was 1387.Sam.Smith.com or 1386.Sam.Smith.com or maybe 1387.Samuel.Smith.com or maybe 1386.Samuel.Smith or 1387.Sam.Smythe.com or... Obviously finding out that the mis-remembered number matches a lot of same-named people won't help at all. (If you believe in correlating names with telephones this way, it's a short conceptual hop to believing that a .pw domain would help you remember your password.)
If you can't autogenerate good phone numbers (i.e., tell people what name they're supposed to use), as I and many others here have argued you can't, what's the alternative? Allow people to choose? Gads, with all the domain squatting it's clear that this would allow much choice to a rich few and little choice to most people. And so it would not be fair at all. The fairest thing I can imagine is to not involve ICANN at all.
And besides, back to the original point about this being a ploy to sell domain registries, if I wanted to have the domain system already remember my phone number, why wouldn't I just have people do nslookup on the names I already own? They already require domain owners to list their phone numbers.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer