Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

The announcement by the Library of Congress that it has acquired the entire Twitter database of messages – several billions of it – might seem like trivial to some.

In fact, the only trivial thing I can think of, is that if you tweet, you can now consider yourself officially published. Not many people have achieved that in their lifetime.

The truth is, that anyone believing that their publicly broadcast messages over Twitter are somehow erased or fade into some sort of digital purgatory needs to have their noob status checked. Anything you send off by hitting that “tweet” button is permanently stored.

The question that arises is, who will benefit from the storage of billions of messages, some as plain as “Yummy, just had lasagna” or as incriminating as “FTW! I banged Missy the other night in her parents’ bedroom!”.

Does the Library of Congress believe that the terabytes of information is of some inherent value, even if it includes president Obama’s first tweet or those of important politicians or celebrities? Is there some other ‘force’ and motive behind this acquisition of information?

I’m not sure what to believe of this massive acquisition of data, however, as with every amount of raw data it doesn’t matter what you have, it’s how you use it. The analysis and processing of such an immense database can generate a lot of important secondary data, that cannot normally be obtained by observing feeds or keywords alone.

In today’s digital world, information can be cross-compared to other data, combined, reformatted – even altered – to the extent that it becomes an alter ego of someone, for purposes known only to the handler of this digital information.

And that’s precisely when things become dangerous.

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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.

With the week almost at midpoint, I had a fun one-hour session on twitter, with regards to humoring the fears of swine flu epidemic. Consider this to be my first (and hopefully not last) session of twitter stand-up comedy.

All the jokes below are mine. If you don’t like them, I will gladly refund your ticket price. But considering how Francois of Domaining.com actually laughed and DM’ed me about compiling them in a post, I think that I’ve at least won France over.

But then again, who hasn’t!

First place to be hurt by swine flu: hot-dog stands in NYC. People will be asking for a chicken taco instead.

Please don’t RT swine flu comments, we don’t need to be infected via twitter !

If I sneeze and snort at the same time, is it swine flu?

The more I post about swine flu, the more followers I get. That’s how flu is spread in the first place.

If you’re ultra-orthodox Jewish, you’re safe against swine flu. It’s not kosher.

Disney HQ bans “Three Little Pigs” movie as a precaution against the swine flu.

Big Bad Wolf now sports a surgical face mask to protect himself against the swine flu.

Women calling ogling men “swine” now feel more empowered.

Porky Pig on FBI’s Most Wanted list!

If the deli person sneezes on my porkchops, is this a swine flu outbreak?

Side-effects of swine flu: having as much mucus as a pig ejaculates. And that’s a *lot*.

Feel free to RT my swine flu jokes. Or not. Spreading swine flu via twitter can be dangerous.

“Stop eating like a pig!”, said my wife. I said, “I have the swine flu, I can’t help it.”

I asked the NYC hot-dog vendor for a pork sandwich. “Are you crazy?”, he said. “Chicken or beef only, orders of mayor Bloomberg.”

I realized I have http://HitPig.com . Should I drop it or risk infecting my other domains?

I knew fried porkchops were unhealthy, now they are lethal. Swine flu is no joke.

Ladies, avoid Cancun in Mexico – on spring break, men act like pigs. You may catch swine flu.

Airplane meals: Would you like the e-coli pasta or the swine flu pork?

“Porky’s” movie banned as a precaution against spreading the swine flu virus.

Swine flu symptom: stuttering like p-p-p-p-p-porky p-p-p-p-ig.

Attempted robbery with a lethal weapon: robber sneezed on the bank teller and asked for money.

Major domain conferences to face fewer crowds due to swine flu. That, and sucky domains on auction.

I registered a “swine flu” domain. “Are you crazy?” said my wife. “You’ll get your portfolio infected”. So I let it drop.

ICANN to allow .flu TLD in order to register the ultimate swine.flu domain.

After I started this “swine flu” joke session, I lost two twitter followers. Hopefully, not to swine flu.

Thanks to “swine flu”, Susan Boyle’s popularity dropped. A virus with good taste?

A guy sneezed on his wife – gets arrested for attempted murder. Can’t do that when swine flu is around the corner.

To be treated for swine flu, apparently you need some oinkment.

Three men walk into a bar…wait, no more swine flu jokes?

Careful when registering .MX domains. Make sure they are screened for swine flu.

ICANN to quarantine the entire .MX Registry for fear of a global swine flu epidemic.