.Tel Them Where to Find You

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/tel-them-where-to-find-you/

by prakash • 18 years ago

21 22 18 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

jmatt• 18 years ago

Wasn't that what the .info was for?

It's not a bad idea. It seems just as likely to end up as another haven for domain name proprietors.

pchristensen• 18 years ago

Trying to think of domain hacks: hos.tel is the only one that comes to mind. Maybe dontaskdont.tel?

mixmax4• 18 years ago

in.tel ?

mixmax4• 18 years ago

on a slightly related note: If you really want a free iphone steve.jobs is not registered :-)

iigs2• 18 years ago

# cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -i tel$ | wc -l

hotel, motel, cartel, hostel are the ones that most people would recognize. The rest are pretty weak.

kirubakaran• 18 years ago

196 words found in http://www.instantwordsearch.com/ for tel occurring anywhere in the word.

johns• 18 years ago

"It will just need to get some traction."

Oh, that's all.

bprater• 18 years ago

Always wondered what the '???????' between 'Create service' and 'Profit' was. Now I know!

mixmax4• 18 years ago

I'm no expert on DNS, but this struck me:

Individuals can also choose to display their location, allowing their contacts to see where they are at any given time and opening the door for location-based services.

As far as I know DNS takes up to 24 hours to update all nameservers, rendering this service completely useless.

Am I wrong on this?

TheBosch2• 18 years ago

Now I could be wrong on this, but I believe that's at the EXTREME end of things, I would say with the way DNS is updated now it usually takes under an hour at most. At least that's my personal experience.

mixmax4• 18 years ago

Thanks for clarifying :-)

But under an hour still kills the concept of location based services.

iigs2• 18 years ago

Sort of. Depending on where this is actually stored it can be instantaneous -- at work we have a pair of servers that serve DNS via MySQL replication, and time from putting data into the master and seeing it in DNS is well under one second.

If they're suggesting you update the .tel TLD servers with your information, the sky's the proverbial limit, but it would be possible for them to keep it pretty tight.

The real problem with this is that there's no notion of ACLs or multiple viewports in DNS -- I reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally don't want any spammer who can find me@iigs.tel to be able to spam me with data from GPS me.iigs.tel records.

olefoo• 18 years ago

You can set the TTL (time to live) of a zone to whatever value you like including zero to force every lookup to go to the authoritative servers (do not do this, it will make your site slow for users and your network administrators grouchy). Most dynamic dns providers have a default of 60 seconds.

From the article it's hard to tell exactly what they are talking about, but it sounds like any of a number of schemes for abusing DNS as a federated database.

kirpekar• 18 years ago

competition to chi.mp ?

TheBosch2• 18 years ago

I think this is a good idea if it takes off. Being able to add billgates.tel to your various e-mail accounts and having your e-mail programs update your contacts daily and before you send an e-mail to that person would be incredibly helpful.

I just got my first smart phone yesterday and am having trouble trying to think of the best place to keep a 'master' copy of my contact records. This could easily solve that problem.

wheels• 18 years ago

So could a decent LinkedIn API.

jerf• 18 years ago

This is incredibly stupid. I can add any record I like to my DNS. If things start querying DNS for those records, fine. But... what is .tel bringing to the party? My DNS server which happens to be at a .org can serve any records it likes!

As CompanyX, why would I want to buy companyx.tel, instead of just sticking those records on my existing companyx.com?

newt0311• 18 years ago

Great idea but DNS is not exactly the most secure of protocols. Also, the current domains can already do this through arbitrary records (as has been mentioned already).

shimon• 18 years ago

There is something very smart going on here, but it's not the idea of using DNS to store contact information. What's smart is the ability of Telnic and its affiliated registrars to convince everyone (ICANN, NYT, probably most HN readers) that they're trying to do something vaguely cool but naive, when in fact they're just going to cash in a huge gift from the internet.

Here's the secret: new top-level domains are virtually guaranteed to make tons of money for registrars. Every medium-sized to large company is going to buy a domain in a new TLD; it's worth the cost just to avoid having to deal with a squatter later, even if it is (gasp) $400. If you can convince ICANN that you have good intentions, or that you need a country code even though you're part of the United States cough.prcough you are going to get a lot of easy money over many years.

And yet, we'll still look back at this in a few years and say "yeah, those .tel guys must be really pissed that nobody adopted their cute little standard."

How naive indeed.

volida• 18 years ago

good luck charging the generation-FREE

mdolon• 18 years ago

From the vids I saw, the main benefits of getting a .Tel domain is so people can easily retrieve your contact by going to your .Tel site either on their PC or mobile device. This information, in turn, can easily be updated by some kind of admin panel by the user, which in turn is updated by anyone else retrieving the info.

Couldn't this same thing be achieved with a simple script and a database? I fail to see the utility of going to a .Tel domain rather than company.com/info or something else. Is it just to bypass the need for hosting?

.Tel Them Where to Find You

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