Telnic Limited, the Registry Operator for the new .tel top level domain, is making the domains available to any buyer. The” Landrush” period opens at 3.00 p.m. GMT today, and allows the purchase of any available .tel domain name with no auctions and no reserve list. We decided to check it out in a bit more detail.
From the release:
“The internet just got richer and a whole lot easier for people to be able to make money through the use of domain names and existing premium rate solutions,” said Khashayar Mahdavi, CEO of Telnic. “People will be able to run everything from chat lines to competitions on a .tel domain and there are no expensive development costs. What’s more, all of these options are available for use on any device connected to the internet, so monetizing the mobile internet has finally become a cost-effective reality. With great names available for anyone to apply for at an affordable price, the world of domaining is opening up as a new investment opportunity to the general public.”
What we think?
I was a bit confused about the .tel domain, but some research has cleared things up. I initially thought it was another domain for hosting mobile websites, like .mobi sites, and I had wondered if we really needed another domain provider.
But .tel is a different sort of animal altogether. Rather than hosting the kind of customisable website that dotMobi provides, Telnic is specialising in extremely rapid access information. Businesses with a .tel domain can store five different types of information: contact information, content links, navigation links, geolocation and indexable texts (like keywords). All this information is stored and accessed directly on the Domain Name System (DNS), to make it as clean and fast as possible. I tested it our for GoMo, and you can see the results in the pics below:
If I had actually bought that domain, all of those would be be one-click contextual links. Clicking the number would start a call, clicking the address would start a mail. This looks to me like a simple, reliable service. It’s not fancy, but it doesn’t need to be. The .tel domains going on sale today are all available at a fixed rate, on a first come first served basis. There’s also no restrictions on re-sale or auctioning once you’ve bought the domain. That alone will attract a lot of attention.
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We’ve also talked a bit about .tel and .mobi on the dotMobi blog at http://dotmobi.typepad.com/dotmobi/2008/11/dotmobi-says-why-tel.html.
However, if you don’t want to pay a not unsubstantial annual recurring charge indefinitely, you can just use other free online address books, where you can be found via Google on a name search.
For instance, you can get a free listing at WikiWorldBook which enables you to be easily found via Google, and messaged via the website. You can publish as much or as little of your contact information as you want.
The website’s message gateway allows users to be contacted without having to reveal their email address. After checking any messages for spam, the message system forwards on the messages to the registered user’s email account, so they don’t have to return to the site. Uniquely, the person contacting them doesn’t have to be registered, thus enabling people to reconnect as easily as possible.
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