Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

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.

Only 10,559 LLL .tel domains left!

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!

Any TLD that *forces* trademark owners to pay a premium price of $125 per year with a compulsory 3 year registration period, is a few cents short of a Madoff scheme. How many trademark holders bit the bullet and forked out $300+ bucks to ensure that their trademark survived the onslaught of this new zombie TLD?

.tel opened its registration doors yesterday, much to the delight of the salivating domain investors it managed to convince about its usefulness. Through its carefully promoted propaganda videos, which included alluring blondes strolling through the London commuter trains, TelNic is trying hard to conceal the fact that .tel sucks harder than a British-made Hoover.

As expected, when registration opened to the general public at 3pm GMT yesterday, most registrars failed to connect to the TelNic registry as hundreds of requests per second filled up the available bandwidth. I tried using Moniker, Dotster and Name.com – the first one failed miserably to even query .tel availability. It took two identical bulk orders for Dotster to secure my domains – that are still not resolving. Name.com was the cheapest at $8.95 per year and a very smooth registration process and sports a management panel that left me impressed.

So what domains did I register?

My trademark, Acroplex was the obvious one. Although I won’t be able to use it like Acroplex.mobi and redirect it to my .com, at least I will set it up as a “business” card. For the sake of this very blog, I also registered Acro.tel; then my last name, and by then I decided to experiment a bit further – all at Name.com’s low rate of $8.95 a pop. GraphicsDesign.tel was registered for me and VoiceTalent.tel for my brother, who’s a radio producer. I ended up registering a couple more domains to experiment a bit with SEO.

All in all, knowing that I’ll never be able to monetize, resell or build a real web site around these .tel zombies, I was content with my purchases. The ongoing argument about .tel’s usefulness has been turned into a well-placed PR propaganda from TelNic that has its followers and “nay-sayers”.

The best purchase of the day though, was when I registered TelSucks.com