In order for the .tel domain to succeed it has to overcome some obstacles. .tel is the first domain to try and change the perception of what domains mean. A .tel domain isn’t about a web page, it’s about your identity. With a .tel domain you can show people who you are with one address. One address that can instantly link to anything that you have created, anything with which you are associated and any way in which you would like to communicate. That is pretty cool.
The problem is that the World of domains is inherently techy, so when you are trying to explain them to someone, if that person does not have an interest in technology, they will likely lose interest, once they detect the technical nature of the topic.
Some people still have a technology block in their brain. Even though people make use of technology daily, they still resist it in many forms.
.tel domain ownership needs to become non-techy for the general public to care. By nature, .tel is a fundamentally different domain. You may be able to do the same things .tel can do on another domain, but you can NOT do what other domains do on a .tel.
What does that mean?
It means .tel domains are not meant for technical people. .tel domains are meant to bring ALL forms of communication together. This includes the World Wide Web but it is not exclusive to web pages.
Right now, the only reason you would want a domain is to build a website. If you don’t need a website, you don’t need a domain. With .tel, a person with no website can use a .tel domain.
A person with personal profiles, photo albums, playlists and forum memberships could certainly benefit from having a .tel domain. A person with no web page, but several phone numbers and e-mail addresses could certainly benefit from a .tel domain.
The average consumer doesn’t want to deal with DNS, web sites, HTML, etc., etc. And if they want the benefits of the web for personal use, they’ll use FB or MS or blog or IM or VoIP or send e-mail, or, or, or. Where this can get complicated is in keeping track of all of these web pages, profiles, e-mails, etc.
Profiles, IM, file sharing and other services are what people use on a personal level. They are easy, cool and fun. Domains aren’t fun. They are not really much of a service, they are a commodity, a product, a responsibility. In comparison to a personal profile, the work to reward ratio is not worth the bother for the average person.
Blogging brought personal websites to a new level of perception. At first, people questioned the value of having a blog. Now people question why you would not have a blog. Microblogging has spawned a whole new subset of communications. Add in social bookmarking, photo sharing, personal profiles and the list gets long very quickly. With a .tel domain all of these things can be brought together into one single location that represents who you are.
The real trick is to make owning a domain cool, fun and exciting but also easy to manage, build and share. When owning your own domain and website becomes as easy as setting up a blog or profile, then the general public will take notice. A .tel domain has the potential to do this and make owning a domain kewl.
This is a good post and makes an important point. In fact I think there are two points here: .tel must be cool, and it must also be very easy and familiar.
At the moment it is neither — for the average person, for the reasons mentioned in this post.
One of the main problems, as I’ve said elsewhere, is that managing a .tel is so darn complex. I mean, three different logins — who is going to put up with that? (The registrar, then the .tel control panel, then TelFriends.)
Another non-easy and, to most people, probably incomprehensible thing: friending is not automatically two-way. I have to friend you AND you have to friend me for us to be linked two ways, and to make matters worse, outgoing friends are in the .tel control panel while outgoing friends are in telfriends, or vice versa — even I can’t keep track and I’m actually rather interested in this stuff.
So yes, it has to become cool, but there is no way that it will become cool until it becomes comprehensible for most people. Three things are required. The first two are things that Telnic has control of and can and should do as soon as possible. The third is something Telnic will need to work with registrars on, and will thus be a more complex project, but it should be done as well.
First, get rid of the dichotomy between the .tel control panel and TelFriends. Have one single .tel management interface, with one single sign-on.
Second, make friending two-way automatically. Yes I know it’s all about ultimate privacy control and so on. Well, forget about all that — I mean, Telnic, do you want to make .tel a success or do you want to be out on the avant-garde of privacy idealism? You can’t have both, and my guess is you care about being successful, not ideologically pure. The masses are totally comfortable with two-way friending; it’s what they’re USED TO. How are you going to sell .tel to the masses if you aren’t willing to give them what they expect?
Third: work with registrars to create a special, consumer-oriented .tel place that is very unlike any UI they offer online at the moment, and give it an attractive name. Jane Citizen is not going to go and do anything at all at a place called “Network Solutions” or “Domain Monster” or what have you. She is absolutely fine with buying goods and services online, does it all the time with Amazon, eBay, Skype, her online bank, and so on, but she needs to feel that she’s in a comfortable consumer-oriented place. New branding is needed if the registrars are to serve the masses. THEN, this new place that the registrars set up has to have an extremely simple, fluid UI that doesn’t talk about domains and stuff, but just asks the user: “what .tel do you want”? and then deals with all the tech stuff in the background, unseen, so that Jane Citizen can just type in janecitizen.tel and click “Next”, enter her credit card details, and bingo, it’s done — she’s taken straight through to a nice page where she starts filling out her .tel details, saving them, and then sending friend requests to all her cool friends who also just got one. No additional sign-on to something called a “.tel control panel”, no third sign-on for TelFriends — just one, single, clean, consumer-oriented, SIMPLE, Single-Sign-On user interface.
I think about this kind of thing every day, professionally (designing and marketing online services) and have been doing so for years. If I’m wrong in what I’m saying here, then I’m no good at my own job. The thing is, I AM good at my job, and successful. And I’m not even charging for this one…
I think .tel is a COMPLETE waist of time and money, not to mention the dumbest idea I’ve come across this century. With all the personal information that already floats around the Internet, social networking sites etc., we’re now asked to trust ANOTHER company with the most valuable information - all our contact info???
And all this for a fee that equals the cost of a full website domain???!!! For what??????
Social networking sites like Facebook have already become the one-stop space where friends can connect and, with increasingly adequate privacy control, share such information. And Facebook is FREE!!
Telnic assume that the techies out there are too stupid to use a blog, or create a basic webpage, or even open a free Facebook account. (And it’s only this category of people that would give a .tel domain a second glance…)
How pathetic. In the days of Facebook, Twitter and micro-blogging, .tel doesn’t stand a chance at succeeding with the masses. (Who are becoming increasingly INSECURE about uploading any such information to ANY server).
Who cares? The best internet services out there are FREE! Telnic is soooo ’90s…
This is an interesting discussion.
Truth is, the last post about how Telnic is so 90’s completely misses the point: Telnic provides a mechanism for individuals/companies to actually own their OWN pointers for their core contact information. As the world gets more interconnected and as our contact information is now required in so many dozens of locations, Telnic uses the DNS system as the global, replicated and publicly available (WITHOUT LOGIN) contact source. This is the chief differentiator between it and credentials-exchange systems like OpenID.
From what I understand, Telnic can power the contact information of all the OpenIDs, Plaxos, etc.–even companies’ websites (through a little javascript that pulls it out of the domain system).
For under $20 bucks a year this seems to be an actually very good investment.