Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Data is far from insufficient, but still, the equation does not compute.

As I’ve written many times before, numbers cannot be disputed. And the numbers about .tel are saying that there is zero growth in that TLD.

While 200k .tel domains were registered between launch to mid-summer of last year, the remainder of the year and a half that dot tel has been around hasn’t been impressive at all.

In August 2009 TelNIC achieved 200k .tel registrations, and by December 30k more had been added. From then on, .tel reached its peak in March of this year – oddly, right before the one year registrations were about to be evaluated on the “drop or not” scale.

It’s been downhill since, with numbers remaining flat around the 240k .tel registrations, despite the introduction of IDN .tel domains.

I read at Domain Name Wire yesterday, that TelNIC will be introducing single letter and two letter .tel domains, apparently in an attempt to add some cashflow via auction or direct sales.

Considering how there are 676 2-letter combinations, TelNIC would probably not release the roughly 240 ISO 3166-1 two-letter combinations; perhaps, as a last resort to add further funds to the bank. Who knows, one day we might see .fr.tel to be promoted as the French revolutionary TLD that would compete against .fr

The biggest failure of .tel has been its restrictive DNS layer and inability to offer – at least, as an option – the ability to turn that layer off and utilize proper DNS records. That, *might* have driven .tel sales up. But let’s not forget .tel was also promoted as a quick way to interact socially, by giving for example .tel URLs to the hot chick you met at the bar instead of a phone number. Unfortunately, the attempt to offer .tel domains to MySpace users wasn’t met with much excitement; once again, TelNIC bid on the wrong horse: who has time for MySpace, when everyone is using Facebook.

Overall, I mostly feel sorry for the few dozen outspoken fans of .tel who truly believed in its initial launch and hoped TelNIC would improve on the functionality and manageability of the .tel domains. As this hasn’t happened yet, the timing of releasing the single and two letter .tel domains appears to be simply for financial reasons.

Some recommended reading from the past:

Fool’s gold: The .tel hype

Fool’s gold Part 2: What the .tel FAQ means

Fool’s gold Part 3: It’s a .mad .mad .tel world

Fool’s gold Part 4: .tel it like it is

Fool’s gold Part 5: The onslaught of the zombie TLD

On Friday, I had an interesting conversation on twitter with Justin Hayward, communications director of TelNic – the registry of the .tel domain TLD. For a person in an upper management position with the TelNic Registry, Justin came forth as being very defensive of his product, forgetting how twitter is a public medium. I understand that he was busy with promoting the .tel goods at Domain Convergence and getting ready for today’s TelCamp 1 in Toronto – a “boy scout” style convention organized by Canadian fans of this controversial TLD. However, Justin had no qualms about telling me to “go to hell” or that if I am not happy with my .tel domains I should “get rid of them”.

Someone hasn’t told Justin Hayward about leveraging Public Relations; he should take a hint from Sedo and how positively they recently responded to the porn ad fiasco.

Overall, Justin Hayward appeared to be unable to respond coherently to my main argument over disliking .tel and that being, that there is no possible way of real development for .tel domain names.  Instead, he pointed me to the rantings of some obscure coder – one of these technology neo-hippies that subscribe to the mantra of “code is poetry“. Not my thing – development in my book is not lines of code rendering text hyperlinks.

Let’s go back to what .tel offers right this minute, several months after its public release through ICANN – all while still in pre-beta mode; an industry first.

TelNic removed the bottom links that pushed the Registry’s contact info but they still maintain the large .tel button at the top right as a reminder that .tel and TelNic owns your info. It’s all about brand recognition riding on whatever you place in the virtual contact card layout beneath – just like WalMart would like to do to all the products you’d buy – if only they could.

TelNic introduced an API that allows programmers to customize certain functions of the underlying DNS layer, and you can conveniently store the info at a .tel domain to your Outlook. As far as I can tell, there is no syncing function that’d allow me to publish info in my Outlook to the .tel domain, instead of using a multitude of beautiful ajax-driven forms that code poets at TelNic have created. Too bad.

With regards to new innovations, there was an announcement of the introduction of an ad API that’d allow the placement of text ads and thus the supposed monetization of .tel domains. Now, thinking how what you view on a .tel domain is a large textpad  of 1994-era hyperlinks, that would make things look even more old-school, all while the large purple .tel button is the sole dominant graphic element on the page.

When it comes down to search engine placement, I did a simple experiment back in March, getting the .tel name of my CPA – he has a hard to pronounce .net domain – and entering all his info as a .tel contact card, with links to the live web site. After submitting it to Google, it’s still #35 in the results when searching for the name. Meanwhile, his obscure .net is still #1. Perhaps it’s the lack of any type of meta tags in the HTML generated by the “code poets” at TelNic; just view the source of any .tel domain and you’ll see what I mean.

The bottom line: .tel is a castrated TLD that was somehow allowed by ICANN to go live while still having unresolved technical issues. Their campaign through the media does not openly disclose that one cannot park, develop or host any web site on a .tel domain. Instead, the main push is for a virtual card that offers no graphic eye candy and no ability to remove the .tel branding.

In my closing statement to Justin Hayward, I responded that he would gain a lot of my support if they introduced a regular DNS layer that would allow .tel owners to develop their domains. It’s technically very simple; a code switch that would allow the current functions to give way to regular DNS resolving. However, as I told Justin Hayward, that’s going to happen when hell freezes over; for a company that supports the “code is poetry” motto that’s downright bizarre.

TelNic is content with the brand recognition and promotion, the same way that Abercombie & Fitch promotes the brand instead of the garment; and that’s too bad in the domain industry that has lots of attractive alternatives to offer.

A new forum for both .tel haters & followers has been launched. TelSucks.com is open for discussions on the new .tel TLD, which is rather controversial in its function and usability. There are areas for discussion and for sales listings, link exchange etc.

From a domainer’s standpoint, .tel appears to be a gimmick that cannot be monetized using conventional methods, as you cannot park it.

The challenge would be to get paid for links on “portal” sites. Given the fact that you cannot use your own branding or even logo, the pages look like virtual contact cards with little if any “eye candy”.

Join TelSucks.com and debate about it!

After pretty much analyzing the prospects of ICANN’s latest TLD – .tel – in my previous three installments, I was patiently waiting for the “free for all” day – March 24 – the day that hordes of lemmings will jump from the high cliff onto this amazing new investment opportunity. Or not.

However, a lengthy comment left at Part 1 of the series by a gentleman named Hanz made me dig a little deeper, just barely below the surface of the .tel propaganda machine.

Hanz, who seems to promote a variety of pills for every disease from his web site, pills.tel, argued on the popularity of .tel domains as seen by Google. For example’s sake, he quoted a company called “Largeco” and that out of millions of results for “Largeco” their .tel domain is #1 in Google.

We’ll see how high Largeco ranks, after my blog post gets syndicated onto Google.

I understand that Hanz chose pills.tel as his only chance to obtain a generic keyword unavailable in any other major TLD – not without paying a few thousand bucks for it. But in doing so, he chose the most unattractive and downright spamalicious TLD to build his linkfarm onto. Hanz, I’ve seen some ugly “viagra” web sites but this one beats them all. No offense, that’s the nature of the .tel beast.

Onto the subject of “Largeco.tel” that Hanz said comes #1 in Google, when searching for “Largeco”.

First of all, it appears that “Largeco” and Largeco.com are owned by Yahoo and are being actively monitored by Mark Monitor for trademark enforcement. So whoever registered “Largeco1.com” that is simply a link pusher for Largeco.tel opened up their options for litigation from the owners of the Largeco mark, Yahoo.

Here lies the “ingenuity” – or rather, stupidity, of the people who decided to register Largeco1.com and set up a page with a large image, depicting “The power of .tel” with a prompt to click on it and visit Largeco.tel

Looking up Largeco1.com at DomainTools shows that the domain is owned by “Benjamin Blumenthal”. There is also another domain hosted on the same dedicated server, which resolves to selma.nic.tel : Smallco1.com – In turn, Smallco1.com is used as a prop for smallco.tel

Nice SEO skills, guys. Using dummy .com pages to push the rankings of .tel domains that belong to fictitious companies. Makes me feel really warm and fuzzy about the capabilities in ranking for .tel domains. Not!

And the final straw:

Looks like Mr. Benjamin Blumenthal is the Director of Marketing for Telnic, according to ICANNWiki.

So there you have it, my friend Hanz: If you show me how high your pills.tel ranks in Google, I might give you some credit. Until then, I will assume that you were fed the same fairy tale as many other hopeful entrepreneurs that already spent $300 a pop for “premium” but useless .tel domains.

I remember the day I got my first phone number and was listed in the White Pages. Then thirty days later, the bill arrived in the mail and I realized it was not as much fun. In the early 90′s I got an email address and in the mid-90s an ICQ number. That’s all I needed so that my friends could reach me electronically.

Fast forward to 2009. The .tel TLD is a month away from “general avaialbility”, having gone through the sunrise and landrush periods. To those uneducated souls that spent $200+ for three years of registration fees during landrush, I will say “poor suckers”.

Do people ever RTFM ?

My combined status as a web developer and domainer allows me to speak with twice the authority. I would not touch the .tel with the proverbial 10-foot pole, unless the .tel Registry changed their functionality plan.

What were they thinking?

The .tel TLD is not your average new domain TLD. You can’t point it to a web page, you cannot park it. All you can do is enter your contact info into a system database / form and it will be displayed as a pretty web page, beautiful icons and all. That’s right. Pay up, “poor sucker” to have a page with 1% the capabilities of a free MySpace page so that you can give that address to friends, family and business contacts.

Did I forget to mention you can’t add any images to it? You want an mp3 playing in the background? Sorry .tel was designed with Spartans in mind. It’s black soup again for supper, Leonidas.

The .tel Registry plays down on all these “concerns” of ours and plays up various reports and press releases from around the world about how .tel is about to change the Internet. Meanwhile, the “poor suckers” that rushed to buy .tel domains en masse now realize that their expensive booty is worthless. It’s all fool’s gold and not a single .tel doubloon can pass the biting test.

Meanwhile, I can still type http://icq.com/11802590 and my ICQ contact info comes up. And it’s all free to keep.

Read more domain news at DNGator.com – your domain news aggregator.