Does .TEL Make Any Sense?

When it comes to TLDs (top level domains, i.e. COM, NET, ORG, etc.) on the internet, several attempts have been made to generate the popularity of COM. All have failed, but that doesn’t mean the people who give us alternatives to COM stop trying.

One of the weirder TLDs out there is TEL. This is billed as a mobile calling card of sorts.. I think.

Right off the bat I think they missed the mark with TEL, because nobody says "telephone" but rather "phone". That being the case, it would have made much more sense if the TLD was FONE instead of TEL, or maybe even TALK or VOX, but TEL?

To those who are in the know when it comes to registering a domain, you would naturally assume that you could host your TEL on any web host provider you wanted, right? Wrong. The content is served by Telnic, and you’re only allowed to use their templates and post content they feel should be on your TEL site.

Having a TEL is not free. It costs $9.99 a year. Yes, that’s cheap, but given the fact you can establish a web presence in many other places for absolutely zero dollars such as on a Google profile, Yahoo! Profile, Windows Live Profile or LinkedIn profile to name a few, why would anyone bother with a TEL domain?

Maybe I’m missing something here. Maybe TEL does have a place in Internet Land.

What do you think about TEL? Boom or bust?

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http://telnic.tel Justin Hayward
Hi Rich,
Firstly, thanks for noticing us! There are a couple of things I’d like to respond to.
You’re absolutely right, .tel is a different type of domain. So anyone wanting to host a traditional website has the choice of I think around 700 extensions to think about.
Secondly, .tel was the TLD that we applied to ICANN for and for the purpose which they approved. We didn’t choose the name of the extension, but actually it is an extremely well-used phrase globally and searched for also.
You make a very good point about ‘to those in the know who register a domain’. There are many more people who haven’t yet registered a domain, for the very reason that they all do the same thing – host websites.
What we’ve done is enabled people to store information as data in the DNS, and for it to be accessible by any device connected to the internet, whether over a browser, through applications or just simply using dig. We’ve done this in a user-friendly way, so people DON’T have to build websites to benefit from sharing information over the internet. We have provided some web templates, which we continue to modify, but this isn’t the sole purpose. Some additional things to perhaps change your perspective:
soft-phones, such as voipgate, kiax, callbyname, etc all allow for direct lookups of .tel to present telephone numbers – the first domain you can dial
we have a proof of concept running at twitter.com/2tel that shows how you can update and access .tel information via an SMS gateway – the first domain you can access offline
There are other examples, but the point is, yes, .tel is different, yes, it will take some time for people to get their heads around and yes, this is about the internet BUT not solely about the web; there’s much more you can do with data than simply stick it into html
Anyway, thanks very much for the piece and the question, as well as the opportunity to explain the differences to your readers.
Regards,
Justin Hayward
Telnic Limited
http://justin.tel
Volker
Also you forget a big thing. Phone is only English. And there are millions of other users out there and they dont use the word “phone” but they do understand what telephone means, like in Germany Telefon, and in Spanish the same, telefono and I can imagine the same goes for similar Latin languages.
In the case that they did made a mistake in the name was with .name (failure) because its only English or with .mobi which is also English from mobile.
.tel is ratter universal.
Today its not a success, but it can if they actually go after their purpose which was to use it as a phone book.
.tel will work if they ever get to this, where I can updated my phone number in my .tel account and its gets updated in all my friends Outlook, and mobile phones as well. If they can achieve this it will be a digital business card and a hit, they just are going the other way, they are trying to make it a social network, hosted website, which is wrong. They should leave it as simple as possible.