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.
Think of .tel as the basis of A Dummies Guide to 419.
I too have my doubts. With the claims that .tel will be read by search engines better, I think it ridiculous. The key to SEO is history, domain name, correct architecture, and content. All they have is content and maybe a domain name if someone is looking for John A. Smith.
I think I will get my personal .tel at the $20, but I certainly would not pay the $375 that they are asking now for the premium names.
I agree with some of the things that were said. But do you not agree that typing in Hertz.tel or Taxi.tel and tapping the number on your phone is much better than searching for the number, going through several websites etc.. etc..
I have done it for the past year on my iphone, traveling and searching for information on it. Its frustrating. I do see purpose in business listings. Regards, Hanz
what do you think of Pills.tel ?
Hanz, just go to Hertz.com and you’re right there. A company that *must* have their contact info on the landing page already does so. I see little use for .tel for businesses; perhaps only those that get suckered into it in the first place.
Acro, why have so many .tels been registered especially Geo .tels.
almost every type of single word is registered as well. Is everyone a fool? I think this has traction people are going to start dot telling.
Thnx
Hanz, why do people do stupid things? I don’t have the answer. But if you read the other two parts – 2 and 3 – about .tel hopefully you will understand why .tel is nothing revolutionary and not even like just any other .ccTLD, where you go after popular keywords.
I won’t repeat all my arguments in a comment but in a nutshell, when you can’t use a .tel domain to a) park it b) develop it, it’s pointless from a monetization point of view.
Replying to Doemainer above, what if search engines start actively supporting .tel by indexing the new domains and showing .tel results with a higher priority than other domains when a specific company name or individual’s name is entered in the search terms?
i.e. I’m with you regarding all the *current* bases of search engine ranking, but what if these change eventually? Search engine criteria weren’t like this ten years ago, it all evolves and changes sooner or later and if .tel is such a change (impossible to tell before we see how it plays out), then the new sTLD will be more important than the critics think.
Dino, if you have inside information, do share. Otherwise, I think I will wait another 10 years before Google’s methods change; such changes are not dramatic and don’t happen overnight (unless the .tel crew strikes some particular deal with Google to treat the data with special prejudice.)
It’s not just the SEO part, it’s the fact that a .tel domain essentially consists of a database query and a template that gets populated with data. It’s not a real domain, no matter how one tries to twist it.
Well, take a look at Largeco.tel it has the number one listing for largeco out of 290 million results. I agree that .tel has different characteristics than othe domains and that not parking or using for adsense are hinderences. However, the point you are missing is that the .tel is going to revolutionize the pay per connection and Iphone click to call generation. type in the site on your mobile and click the number. Sure all sites provide contact numbers etc, but they are all provided differently and on different pages etc, when your on the road on your mobile phone you know you can type in what you want like pills.tel or Pizza.tel and you are going to get that number and dial within seconds. Your point for monetizing or parking are taken, however these are old and used up formats with practically zero revenue generation unless your site is in the top 5000. .Tel has the potential for phone connection services where other sites do not. Contact pages buried in various formats are not quickly viewable from most mobile phones.
As far as the comment that people are stupid for buying .tel, I think your judgement is arrogant in thinking that you are smarter than everyone else. Within days of Landrush for .tel all of the european geo names were bought. Why do you ask is this, (and no 1000’s of buyers are not just stupid people per your remark) in europe Skype and Voip phones are more prevalent. The .tel voip features that are developing will be heavily used first in Europe and Asia, then migrate to the US.
People will begin to type names in Voip phones instead of numbers and .tel will be the method to deliver this.
Looking past short sighted views and old non progressive thinking will allow you to see what trends that will be billion dollar trends and 100 billion dollar trends in the future.
All of the applications and development tools for .tel are in the early stages, the template that is provided now, the services that are provided now, all will progress and change as developers develop open source apps and phone apps.
A truly live address book, which updates at whatever set interval with all your friends and business contacts is a very valuable tool. Communication is the function of everything we do on a daily basis. Any improvement with communication involved will be widely used.
Imagine a global organization with 1000 sales people with live contact information updated by the minute in their phones.
.tel has its uses, and I think you are overlooking them and only looking to ways that you personally would use the .tel in your current businesses.
I respect that and agree in ways, but my point is that there is a specific use and that use is directly linking the world wide web to direct phone conections in a quick and simple way.
Regards, Hanz
Hanz, I went to pills.tel that you own, and it’s the epitome of a spammer’s “viagra” listing. I had a good laugh at the way that you naively perceive things: “all these names were bought, therefore it must be good”.
It must be good, in another dimension, where people cannot build their own pages the *exact* way they want to. As a domainer and as a developer, I will continue to advise people who heard about the “.tel” to stay clear from it.
You seem to be either obsessed with the .tel domains you acquired at $300+ a pop for 3 years, or you’re part of the .tel crew. Full disclosure please, Hanz. As for your statement that I’ve been arrogant in my criticism of the .tel situation, I think that anyone who unveils and documents the truth is seen with angry eyes by the perpetrators of untruth.
Let me go to your “largeco” example: Looks like this entity was built exclusively by the .tel crew to demonstrate how .tel works. It’s an artificial entity, a non-existent company. In fact, the same web server hosts “largeco1.com” and “smallco1.com”. Thank you for giving me enough material for Part 4 of the series. 😀
Don’t Underestimate Innovation:
When a .tel server detects communication from a non-mobile device, it could provide the domain owner with the ability to “toggle-on” functionality that would automatically launch a companion pop-under website (a second URL) that would appear below the standard .tel contact page.
This would provide domain owners with all the existing benefits of .tel in combination with the traditional functionality we have come to expect from standard websites. By way of analogy, I do believe the Yellow Pages has had some measure of success with larger, accompanying page ads that display additional merchant content.
It was a $300 gamble. If it takes off sweet. If not, oh well. I make $300 in a few hours. Who cares.
Hmmm….I heard these same comments before with different products:
A domain name? who is going to type in http://www.blahblahblah.com when they can pick up the phone and dial the company?
ANOTHER browser? What’s wrong with IE (stop laughing)?
ANOTHER search engine? Yahoo finds what I need.
I could had invested in two companies that were fledglings: Microsoft and Cisco. I never dreamed either of them would dominate their respective markets. $10,000 invested in either of them would have returned millions.
My father-in-law had a chance to invest in a company for 250,000. He had the money, but he didn’t see the value and he didn’t speak to me about it. The company? Skype.
I have coworkers who laughed at me when I started an Internet business and made $5 for a month’s work.
They stopped laughing when I showed them $1500 checks every month for the last 4 years.
That being said,
Some people can’t pony up the $300 to snarf a cool (or not so cool) .tel domain name. Don’t poo-pooh those of us who are willing to take a chance.
If the .tel I reserved goes nowhere, no biggie. I will write it off under my domain business.
If, however, there is demand (and from what I can see, at least 5 similar .tels have been taken by big name entities), my iron pyrite will be transmuted into sweet internet gold.
Stay tuned!
Johnny, that’s quite a fine sales pitch there. I am not going to judge your former or current success.
But to quote a famous disclaimer: “Unique experiences and past performances do not guarantee future results! Testimonials are non-representative of all clients; certain accounts may have worse performance than that indicated”.
In other words, comparing apples to oranges might burn a hole in your pocket, the size of the ozone hole over the south pole.
“Ponying up” $300 a pop sounds like a serious risk, per all the reasons I’ve quoted in the four segments of this saga.
Investors that fail to do their own research and solely rely on an “entrepreneurial drive” to invest per Telnic’s pretty videos, risk seeing their 24 karat gold turn into iron pyrite instead. If you’re not concerned, go for it.
I own two .TEL domains. They are categories, not specific names. I plan to sell spots on the directory for $100/year. Can you imagine Doctor.tel and Dentist.tel …. pretty cool eh? A directory structure that sorts by geography and specialty.
The innovations will make the case for themselves. I say let the people who don’t understand stay that way – makes it easier for the rest of us to make another round of money.
This will be huge by 2012
Eric, you mean you own two domains that don’t resolve.
Listen, I develop web sites and I have doctors and dentists as clients. It’s a cut-throat business and they want really “flashy” sites, with graphics and positive images.
Good luck populating your minimalist .tel domains, once Telnic fixes the URL forwarding glitch. Doctors don’t pay to be listed in an obscure TLD’s “web page” that looks like it came out of AOL in 1992.
Well, I am surprized it got passed ICANN – how can they allow a company to sell names and not domain names? All domain regs are jumping on the fake gold bang wagon by sticking .TEL at the top of availability lists to entice people into buying them.
We should demand a refund as its not a domain name, but a directory listing with no DNS, NO email, NO nothing.
<<>>
Yes it does … along with ads for Ukrainian dating services. I look at it this was, .tel may reach a tipping point and if it does it will replace phone numbers, ICQ, etc. Why give out a phone number that’s hard to remember when you could be acroplex.tel. Oh, but that’s been taken … forever.
Some doctors and dentists may want flashy web sites, but I’d rather have a billboard on a busy interchange with one large word: heartdoc.tel.
Methinks you doth protest too much … like the manufacturers of buggy whips did at the dawn of the auto age.
Thanks for sharing, Ed. Today Telnic announced that they will open up the DNS pools. No more problems with parking, hosting etc. .tel domains!!!
Being a very new member and owning a few .tels(30), I’ve searched this thread for a main theme to monetize the .tel. Some members have chosen to developing a site, some have a bias toward selling, others I’m not sure what they’re planning.
What is happening with .tel? Are the minions clamoring for their .tel? GA being twenty days on, I haven’t seen much activity anywhere. No real news from media such as CNBC, what about slashdot.org or similar, nothing only this lonely little outpost. So, did I invest unwisely…, perhaps it’s to soon to .tel. The answer may becoming from .tel owners, not waiting for Telnic to publish positive reports or advertise in a meaningful way. While searching facebook, myspace etc for any information came upon the following .tel domain videos:
http://bit.ly/63by youtube models
http://bit.ly/yJqLV washing machine
http://bit.ly/72cP iphone example
Although a tawdry and base use of .tel it seems this is one way to monetize. Would I choose this method? no,, but it seems quite remarkable compared to the efforts put forth by Telnic. So, I ask again, what is going on with .tel? Where is Bradpitt.tel, Angelina.tel, Johnmayer.tel. There seems to be no celebrity.tel interest and without where are we? Perhaps we members are waiting for nothing to happen and it’s happening. The last chat with DM they stated they’re selling .tel domains at a record pace, all well and good until those domains come up for renewal. We need traction at a much larger level, who will provide it, someone less intoxicated than I but someone must…
http://bit.ly/1XkIir myspace forum post
se venden chivos,
El Coyote Toxico