23/03/07

.tel me about it! - .tel domain open for registration soon.

On Friday 2nd of March ICANN announced it has added the .tel domain to the DNS root zone, making it the 15th top level domain under contract with ICANN, on the internet.

What is the .tel domain?

According to Telnic - the domain registry ICANN has put in charge of .tel - companies as well as individuals will be able to use their .tel domain to publish and update their contact information directly in their domain's DNS records.  This allows them to decide, on the spot, by what specific channel they want to be reached by friends, colleagues etc. This might include: VoIP, telephone (fixed or mobile), Skype, SMS, e-mail, Instant Messengers and possibly many other new and emerging applications.

Obviously, .tel is not just another domain in the classic sense. .tel intends to become a state of the art, decentralized, globally accessible and privacy-enhanced contact directory.

Here's a scenario of how this might work. Imagine you want to call your friend Ellen Meersman, whose contact details are already stored in one of your directories as ellenmeersman.tel. Your phone or computer will then connect to ellenmeersman.tel and it will receive a response with all contact options that Ellen Meersman has decided to make available at that very moment. These options could be phone:ellenmeersman.tel, icq:ellenmeersman.tel, e-mail:ellenmeersman.tel, skype:ellenmeersman.tel or mobile:ellenmeersman.tel.

You can select which one of the available contact methods you want to use. In case you choose Skype, the Skype application willl be launched and sends out a contact request for skype:ellenmeersman.tel. The DNS server will respond with whatever Skype username Ellen has entered as the one she is using at that very moment. Your phone will then use that username to call Ellen on Skype.

If Ellen would want to be left alone she could instantly deactivate all records except e-mail:ellenmeersman.tel and voicemail:ellenmeersman.tel. Then you'd understand that she doesn't want to be disturbed, so you'd send her an email to whatever address Ellen is currently using.

All of this would be completely transparent. You don't have to remember or store all the contact options of each one of your contacts (assuming they are using a .tel of course). All you need is yourcontact.tel.

.tel domains will be issued on a first come first served basis. So, for all the Jan Janssens out there, the first one to buy janjanssen.tel will get it. Everyone else will need to get jjanssens.tel, janssens.tel and possibly jjanssens123.tel or some other combination. Jan may already have another online username (with ICQ, Skype, Messenger, GMail, Hotmail, etc) that he may choose to use, for example: thiscooldude.tel.

To facilitate searching for a person within the .tel domain, Telnic will allow keywords to be added to the domain to help distinguish them in a search. For example, a search for Jan Janssen could turn up several results, but when the searcher sees the keywords, 'Brugge, teacher, nickname: Janke' he'll see which one is the right one.

Telnic will also allow .tel domain owners to restrict access to specific pieces of information to certain people (pretty much like a buddy list in instant messengers). For example, somebody could choose to make his work number public and accessible to everyone, but restrict access to their mobile phone number to family members.

.tel also includes privacy features to prevent access to sensitive contact details including emails, home or mobile telephone numbers or anything else users might consider confidential. Preventing unsolicited communications is an issue which users can easily manage. In Skype; with a simple click, users can configure their Skype client to only allow contact from people on their contact list (their buddies). The .tel domain will work in a similar way.

For .tel to become commercially viable it will need to be supported by a large number of devices and applications. Telnic plans to release free applications to allow .tel domains to be integrated with most commonly used address books found in computer systems, PDA's and mobile phones.

Telnic plans to announce the official .tel launch timetable shortly

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