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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 may pose a problem with the 526,000+ people sharing the name Michael Smith.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
This is way better than .biz, which I can only guess that they just banged out without thinking twice about.
Maybe it's about time we stopped conforming to top level domains?
.com, .us, .ca, or dot anything?
If I want a web site, why can't it be www.boxlight -- or www.boxlight.this.is.cool -- why does it have to end in
boxlight
We can put it to good use like .coop, .cat, .biz, .arpa, .aero, .info, .jobs, .mobi, .museum, .name, .pro, .travel, and .int.
.tel.
God knows it's time for
In the spirit of delicio.us, I can see a porn site called showand.tel being registered.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
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!
No way. Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!
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
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.
Todd Masonis, a co-founder of contact management service Plaxo Inc., is familiar with the hassles of keeping track of everyone. His parents have had the same house and phone number for some 30 years, and "for a long time that was how they are identified," Masonis said.
Really? Your parents are called Mr and Mrs 945 Chestnut Street? How odd.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
.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?
It's not that I don't want to see ".tel" happen, but what is taking them so long to approve and implement new top-level domains anyway.
.tv, .biz and .tel (and .xxx) from the very beginning and at least a dozen more for each specific area of interest/business, we'd not have the ridiculous situation with domain scarcity we have today (even if, as I wrote earlier, it's still possible, although frustrating, to find a good .com domain nowadays).
It's because they were so late to introduce a large variety that ".com" become synonymous with "web" and everybody wanted his site to be a ".com"
Should've they introduced domains like
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.
I was thinking of buying ho.tel. That way clients can easily find the number for a pro they like.
Can I bum a sig?
This is a moronic idea. I'm sure someone else in the thread has explained why by now. Here's my beef though: domain names are a fundamentally bad idea.
o ld=3&mode=thread&commentsort=0&op=Reply. But this is an implementation detail. Why am I, a consumer, being exposed to this? Irrelevant implementation details should be hidden from the user! Is what we're seeing now really so far removed from showing me slashdot's IP address? We cover up IP addresses with domain names, because we know it's too hard for people to remember a series of random numbers, but why can't we go the next logical step after this?
Think about it. Do we still need domain names? People made up the "I'm feeling lucky" ifl: protocol as a joke, but isn't it true? Can't we find anything with Google anyway? Why should we have to remember a particular address with a complicated system of slashes and characters to get to a particular page? Right now, my URL is http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183301&thresh
Here's what I'm proposing:
Let's extend ifl: or something like into a real protocol. A trusted source, or better a network of user selectable sources, assigns keywords to URLs based on tagging by users via hyperlinks to the source and delicious-like tags. Normally, the URL bar shows nothing but the title the site has given itself (in our case, "Slashdot") and the particular page being viewed ("Reply to thread"), but on request, the URL bar can generate a user shareable set of keyword tags for the site with hash codes for pages to prevent collision (think about the addresses generated snipurl and the like; "ifl:Slashdot/4bacc23"). For the purposes of bookmarks, traditional URLs can be stored, but since these URLs won't be exposed to users, Ford Motor company can use a23rf2.ifl and Ford Modeling Agency can use j737bdh.ifl, and no one will care, since it won't be possible to hijack a keyword without the agreement of the majority of users. (No more Whitehouse.coms!) Domain names can stick around, so that people are free to assign multiple IPs to the same site, but the concept will become a background detail that users need to know nothing about. Until the technology is built into all browsers, URL-to-ifl translator sites can fill in the gap: "go to http://ifl.com/Slashdot/4bacc23 or just ifl:Slashdot/4bacc23..." but since this won't be hard to integrate into browsers as a plug-in, I imagine it can be implemented quickly.
So, what do you guys think? Am I being naive about the possibility of the keyword space being kept pure without a registrar? Need I point out that the keyword space is *already* polluted, inspite of that barrier?
Yes, so I can have FirstnameLastname.tel, with my telephone number, so the telemarketing scum can associate my name with my number and bother me.
Yes, that sounds like a GREAT idea - I think I'll also put my social security number, my alarm codes, a Google maps link to my house, a picture of my house key, and my bank account numbers up there as well.
Look, if my company wants to set up a contact page they can set up a web page under their already existing domain name. If I want a contact page, I can set it up under my already existing personal web space. What does a new TLD add to this?
Now, *IF* they were talking about a new transport class (like http:// and ftp://) for encapsulating telephone numbers, such that a link to tel://8675309 would get me Jenny on the line, that *might* be useful.
But hell - I haven't even signed up for MYCALL@arrl.net to avoid being spammed by any asshole who scrapes my callsign (and I already have this one jackass who has done exactly that - he scraped my callsign and now he keeps adding me to stupid services like plaxo and the like, even though I've told this tool quite sharply that I don't want him bothering me.)
www.eFax.com are spammers
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?
Wow! If only someone had thought of that before!
All's true that is mistrusted
What you describe is, in fact, the original way the web was supposed to work. URLs were supposed to be a hidden layer of server-specific information; users would refer to pages via URIs, Uniform Resource Identifiers, and there would be a mapping layer from URI to the current URL.
Unfortunately, URLs and DNS hacks turned out to be "good enough", nobody saw the need for a global location-independent naming system for web pages, and we ended up with today's system.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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.
Excuse me, but while I agree with 92% of your examples,
www.eFax.com are spammers
Used a dictionary much?
From www.m-w.com: "the name borne in common by members of a family". That sure seems to indicate that a "surname" is a "family name."
From dictionary.cambridge.org: "the name that you share with other members of your family."
According to www.etymonline.com: "Meaning 'family name' is first found 1375."
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
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