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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.
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
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.
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.
Actually, it's a function of how the current heirarchical domain system works. I'm not saying that it's absolutely required, but we would have to change quite a bit of the fundamental nature of the Internet if we eliminated all TLD's. I'm going to grossly oversimplify here, but basically, when I submit a query for foo.com, the very first thing queried is the top level domain, in this case, .com. If I were to submit a query to foo.org, the query would take a different path in resolving the name. Same with foo.net, foo.us, foo.biz, etc. The bottom line is that something needs to provide the first basic direction as to how the query is resolved. foo.com is a sub-domain of .com. support.foo.com is a subdomain of foo.com. us.support.foo.com is a subdomain of support.foo.com, etcerera. Without top level domains, we would basically make every DNS query a top-level query, and we would have to change the basic structure for how the Internet works. Note: for a more detailed definition of how DNS queries work, I highly recommend googling the subject. Makes for good nerd reading, and I'm sure the thousands of pages you get will do a better explanation than my single paragraph.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
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?
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
But imagine if the internet was just a vast wasteland of porn and spammers.
That doesn't require any imagination.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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
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