Republished with permission from the Telsters.com forums:

The .tel tld is a brilliant idea. I love the idea and I really hope it succeeds. But it faces daunting challenges - indeed, downright obstacles - to widespread adoption by the public at large. Here are some of them. I list these not to be negative about dot-tel, but to see how these challenges are being met. In order to be positive, I’m also offering some potential strategic answers, underneath.

First the challenges:

1. It’s too hard to communicate to Jane Public, her children, and her children’s’ grandparents what the difference is between what .tel is trying to do and what Plaxo, Facebook, and LinkedIn do. This is related to “It’s too techy” - Jane public and her family couldn’t care less whether information is stored directly in the dns or on a website. In fact, they will never bother making the effort to understand the difference. They don’t want to know from dns. For them, Facebook is best because you can put nice photos on it, which you can’t do with .tel — they’ll never understand why, what the difference is, etc. As far as they’re concerned, if they want to control their contact information centrally, there’s already Plaxo or LinkedIn or, indeed, Facebook, which are all free and all look much nicer and are all much more intuitive to use.

2. It’s too techy. Jane Public doesn’t know from domain names, and doesn’t want to. She MIGHT just know what a domain name is, but she’s never registered one in her life and it has never occurred to her that she may ever need or want to.

3. It’s not free. Ten or fifteen dollars might seem like such a low price that it requires little or no thought. But it’s not about how much — it’s about having to pay anything at all; having to go through the hassle of entering credit card details etc., and then having an amount be charged on a periodic basis, etc. People have been educated to believe that while you of course have to pay for anything physical that you order and that has to be delivered in a package, purely electronic offerings online should be, and are, free.

4 Apart from the techiness of it, it’s also just too complex at the moment. People are used to a simple, intuitive, SINGLE sign-up. With .tel you have to go through not one, not even two, but THREE separate sign-ups. First, you have to register a domain, which is bad enough (see number 2 above). Probably you don’t already have an account at a registrar (in fact probably you don’t even know what a registrar IS). So you have to sign up at a registrar. Then you have to choose a username and password for telhosting (if that registrar’s implementation of telhosting lets you choose). This will already lose a whole bunch of Jane Publics. THEN, once you’re in telhosting, you STILL have to activate TelFriends, using yet a third username-password set. This is a recipe for eternal obscurity. And lastly, to make things REALLY bad, the friending procedure is totally unconventional and not what people expect or want. If I send a TelFriends request to someone and they accept, then I can see their private info but they still can’t see mine (or is it the other way round? I can’t keep it all straight…) until THEY send ME a separate request which then I have to accept. This is totally against how everyone has come to expect a friending process to work. On all the social networking sites, if you send me a request and I accept or I send you a request and you accept, the result is the same: we are linked as friends in both directions. This is intuitive and how it should be. I have heard that TelFriends’ unusual approach is to give people more control over privacy, but people just aren’t going to want this, and it’s going to confuse them, put them off, and result is non-take-up of TelFriends. It’s a degree of data privacy that nobody wants. It’s just intuitive that if I want you to give me access to your private info then I will be willing to give you access to mine as a matter of course, and that is what people expect. So, in sum, three different sign-up procedures and then a baffling, confusing friending process — this is just not going to ever gain mass traction.

These are significant obstacles to .tel ever becoming anything as well-known and widely-used as the old Yellow Pages. How can they be overcome?

1. Set up a specialised registrar for ONLY .tel domains. This registrar’s interface will completely and natively integrate telhosting, so that there is only ever one sign-up procedure and only ONE username-password set for managing all aspects of the .tel domain. The registrar has to be a different legal entity from Telnic, of course, but that’s no great problem.

2. Make .tel domains free for the first few years, while making it clear to new users that, two or three years down the road, there will be a very small fee for the domain. (Caveat — see 5 below — people would willingly pay for a great e-mail offering.)

3. Drop TelFriends. WE (those using this forum) understand why TelFriends ISN’T just a totally lame, totally restricted and boring social-networking effort that is light-years behind Facebook and the others, but this is impossible to communicate to the vast public. The efforts so far, with all the mention of dns and what have you, are ineffectual because NOBODY CARES about data being stored in something mysterious called a DNS. This kind of talk is for geeks ONLY. If that’s Telnic’s only market ambition — getting the geeks and domainers interested — then I’m reading them wrong.

4. Partner with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo, and others. The MySpace deal was good, a step in the right direction, shows correct thinking. But MySpace’s audience and user base is just not the market for .tel; the demographic for .tel is university graduate and older-than-25. What should the partnerships consist of? Integrate into those social networking sites a direct, single-sign-on access to one’s own .tel information, which is then distributed, through the same integration, out to all of one’s social networking accounts. Let’s say I keep a Facebook account, a LinkedIn account, and a Plaxo account. On each of those, I enter my .tel domain, username, and password to link, say, my Facebook account with my .tel domain. I do this also at LinkedIn, Plaxo, and wherever else, but only have do to this ONCE at each of them. (This could even be taken one step further and, with the right partnership in place, you could actually create an account on the dedicated registrar within your, say, Facebook account, and maybe even register a domain, all within your Facebook account, via webservices to the registrar.) From then on, each of my social networking profiles will always get (via webservices) and show to my “friends” my current contact information. And I can control who has access to what level. For example, I can set the info that is public in my .tel to be shown on my public internet profiles for each social networking site, and then, for the private .tel info, I can choose, for each, say, Facebook Friend, whether they can see my private .tel info or not. This of course requires the necessary integration with Facebook etc, but technically it’s trivial; the challenge is at the business relationship level. The same type of partnership could be set up with Amazon, e-Bay, i-Tunes (well, okay, probably not Apple), Google Accounts, etc.

5. At the new specialised registrar set up in point 1 above, make it VERY EASY for users to have e-mail at whatever@their.tel — in fact, include it in the package by default (to opt out of if you want to save, like 10 or 20 dollars per year), providing both an attractive web email interface AND IMAP support so that people can use it nicely on their iPhones etc. People will like this, they’ll see value in it. You might not even have to do the first couple of years for free — people will be happy to pay ten or twenty dollars per year for email@their.tel (they pay some crazy amount each year for a MobileMe account, so we know this.)

6. Once the above elements are in place, do tons and tons and tons of viral marketing (only because all other types are too expensive).

I will close by saying I wish the Telnic guys every success. But, and again without wishing to be negative, I do fear that, the way things are set up at the moment, this just isn’t going to take off. The current set-up is for the few domainers, geeks, and assorted eccentrics who have the level of interest and technical comfort to start doing something with .tel — it’s going to exclude the masses unless major changes are made.

Paul Miller - Telsters.com Member

See more discussion about this post in the Telsters forums here: http://www.telsters.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=256