The Google of online phone books

I think you missed one crucial point dc, austin, tx. There is no website to maintain. There is no need for any .tel owner to even know what a search engine is. There is no need to mention the word hosting. It’s all point and click, it exists in dns, it is simply there on any device, any time.

I just got my vip.tel trial yesterday and I’ve been tinkering with it since. Interesting future with this .tel domains. For those interested in seeing what the page looks like, check out mine http://jamarie.vip.tel

The spam concern is sound, but presumably not too many .TEL owners are going to publish their own e-mail address in the public domain with an invitation to be scraped.

.TEL is about convenience. It’s like a personal (or business) bookmark. It’s one simple entry in an address book and you’re done. From there on all the data is automatically updated.

I’m not a well connected person by comparison to many, but even I’ve gathered over 1000 contacts in my Outlook address book over the years. I’d guess that 30% of them have some out of date information and I know for a fact that about 80% contain only an e-mail address and/or one phone number – and it’s never the number I want.

I’m happy to pay the $20 to get my mom a .TEL. It will make my life a little easier and if she only knew 19 other people, a buck a year seems a small price to pay. I’ll be getting one too. It will make my friend’s lives easier and stop them having to update every time I move, join a new group or change numbers. Multiply that by 500 or 1000 and I think they’ll be pleased.

I’m also planning to use it as a central secure place to store a whole whack of everyday personal and family information, like the babysitter’s number, emergency contacts, my doctor’s name, which I can never remember. I’ll make this private for either just myself or members of my immediate family and will be able to access it from any device. In fact the only thing I’m making public is my name. Everything else will require friending/authentication.

On the business side, it’s true there are a lot of ways to contact a company. Yes, I can Google it and hope it comes up near the top. Then browse to the site, then find the contact page. And hope you’ve built it for mobile devices. But I’m a customer. And a lazy one that expects the vendor to make my life easier.

All other things being equal, I’m more likely to go to yourCompetitor.tel where I can instantly access their address, find them on a map and call customer support or sales directly. I can find the branch nearest me, find any department and get to the person I need quickly.

It’s pretty easy to bash a new technology, but it’s worth thinking about the potential as well. LinkedIn is great. OpenID is great. The new dot Me is probably great too. But this thing isn’t any of them. And of the other technologies that are trying to address similar problems, this one seems to be way out in front in terms of easy of use and consumption. I think it has the potential to be something pretty extraordinary.

I’m with the previous poster (hey- I’m also in Austin!). I’ve been using the net in it’s ever evolving form for 22 years- longer than most, but certainly less than some. It’s never been a problem for me to have my info available (and indexed) when I’ve wanted it to be, and subsequently it’s never been a problem for me to have my info unavailable, until lately. (well, there was that attempt at a net archive, including usenet posts, but that disappeared sometime previous to google appearing if I remember correctly, but that was awhile ago). Now with search engines caching info so effectively, it’s hard to disappear info quickly.
I just don’t see “everyday consumers” wanting to pay $20-30 a year (does that include both registration and hosting fees?) to open themselves up to yet another avenue to get spammed- and there are plenty of ways already to get ones professional info out there. Then of course if you want to be on this thing- to get indexed well on this thing (better than other people with the same name), there will be probably be another wave of having to play “fool the search engine”, and what might have started to be a simple matter of inputting info into a form, people will have to learn the fine art of webcrawler (indexing) heuristics/algorithms- with invisible text, invisible graphics, and all that goes with trying to get one-up on the search engine page.

I don’t see it, nor do I see the need for it- but I certainly couldnt have predicted some of the weird ways this thing has evolved (or hasn’t in others- such as the repeated rejection of the .xxx domain, which would be the best way to filter smut to keep it out of the kiddies laptops (pun unintended- but I like it now that I see it!)).

Good luck mate- I hope it works out. Nothing wrong with entrepreneurial spirit.

Wow… I wonder how much VC funding was pumped into this idea?

Does my mom need a .tel site? Nope?

Does my business need a special web page with all of it’s contact info? Nope… you can find all of that contact info on the website my company already maintains. Or you can just google my company and get all the info you need.

Wait… maybe I need a place to publish my professional contact info so that people who know me can find me. That’s a swell idea… it’s called LinkedIn and it works great.

Sorry, but I just don’t see the point of this.

If you can type someones name.tel on your browser, then certainly a webcrawler can take a snapshot of each .tel profile a create there own database of contact info. Who would want THAT!!! Put any contact email address in your .tel profile, and within days you will get enough spam to feed a 3rd world counrty.

Telnic doesn’t sell the .tel direct, it sells through ICANN-accredited registrars. However, the allocation of names is obviously centralized. The fairest way we have chosen is for it to be first-come, first-served. There are no auctions, reserve names or premium names.

How will Telnic handle different people that want to register the same name?

The contact information is not stored on Telnic or anyone’s web servers, it is stored under the control of the .tel owner. Information viewable publicly can be seen by anyone, but information made private is encrypted and only the .tel-owner can grant access to it. So Telnic nor the registrars who sell the domains ever get access to this information and thus cannot sell it.

And what happens when they decide to sell this information?