As of Tuesday 3rd of February Telnic has entered the “Landrush” phase of it push on the new .tel top level domain name. The company, who has been handed control of the domain name by ICANN, have started selling the new name to the general public. That’s right, you and me!
The idea of .tel is to be a gigantic web based directory of everybody, and anybody, who wants to register themselves with the company. In the future, you, if desired, will be able to type bengaul.tel into a browser, and yours truly may well have an entry that could include my phone number, email address, home address, and even skype contact details. You have the option, of course, to exclude any details you would rather the general public did not have access to, as the page that is created has a Facebook like acceptance model, whereby you can choose who may look at your details.
Companies have already had the chance to bag their .tels, with Microsoft, Google, Cisco, all having already got their grubby old mitts on theirs in the “Sunrise” phase of the sales. And if you would like to bag your joebloggs.tel in this “Landrush” phase, be prepared to part with £325 big ones for a three year subscription. However you can wait until the “General Availability” phase where you can pick up a joebloggs4324656661.tel for a measly £14.95 per year.
Quite how many ordinary people are going to use this service is beyond me, but in the “Landrush”, I fear not that many. If you are looking at doing things a bit cheaper, then hiring a .com and a bit of web space could be more your thing, even if it’s not optimised for searching. Certainly I could see companies using this more, although they tend to have their contact details on their established web pages anyway. Tell me what you think? Maybe .tel will be the next .com!
One thought on “Will you .tel?”
They look as though they are coming under more competition from free address book services –
http://www.prweb.com/releases/Freeonlineaddressbook/challengestelnicdottels/prweb3459084.htm