Identity management service Telnic, which runs the .tel domain, announced on Tuesday that registering for a .tel domain has gone from its initial "land rush" phase into general availability.
Tens of thousands of domains have been sold so far, communications director Justin Hayward told CNET News, and the company will be having a launch event on Tuesday evening in New York to start spreading the word.
Telnic is sort of hoping that a .tel URL will become the online equivalent of a business card or, as Hayward put it, "one permanent point of contact, a bit like a telephone number." A .tel domain aggregates a list of chosen contact points--Web site, e-mail, telephone, social-network profiles, location data, etc.--and aims to be both flexible (if your telephone number changes when you go from one country to another, for example) and ironclad when it comes to privacy controls.
In conjunction, the London-based Telnic has announced that News Corp.-owned social network MySpace is now a .tel vendor and that MySpace users can purchase .tel domains directly for $19.99 per year, starting on Wednesday. This is part of .tel's strategy to make its domain-purchasing process more consumer-friendly than the norm.
"We're delighted that MySpace will be offering .tel domains to its community, enabling them to more quickly and easily manage all aspects of their online life," Telnic CEO Khashayar Mahdavi said in a release. "MySpace is exactly the type of partner that has the foresight to see the .tel (domain) as a complementary product, providing choices as social networkers adopt new modes of communication while they continue to enjoy the benefits of MySpace."
The .tel domain originally launched at the Demo conference last September. Right now, one of the most promising opportunities for the space is on the mobile front--using these electronic records as a way to exchange contact information in a meet-and-greet context.
A lot of this will depend on third-party developer activity (think iPhone applications). But Hayward said one of .tel's resellers, IWantMyName.com, can enable prospective users to complete the registration process entirely on an iPhone.
The other company generating buzz in this space is Chi.mp, a San Francisco start-up that offers members their own .mp domains. Both Chi.mp and .tel allow members to divide their profiles up into public and varying degrees of friends-only access.
Two domain-based identity sites will be in the media this this week: Telnic's .tel, which launches at DemoFall, and Chi.mp, whose team will be holding court across the street from the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday (clever strategy, that). I think these two companies make a trend, but I'm not convinced it's a long-lived one.
The simple concept behind both companies is this: You'll get your own name in a domain, a .tel or .mp, and then use it as a hub for your online identities and content. The sites will offer some blend of a business card function, like Plaxo, and personal feed aggregaton, like Friendfeed. The pitch from both is similar: Instead of sending people to a page that's heavily branded by someone else (for example, Facebook), you can give out your domain. Keep that updated with your contact info, and then as long as people know your domain, they'll have a way to reach you.
I would not be surprised if both of these sites also became OpenID authenticators (Chi.mp already is). It's convenient for users. Chi.mp founder Tony Haile's vision for Chi.mp's utility is quite similar to the promise of OpenID and to the concepts in DiSo and the Social Graph API, emerging protocols for sharing social network data between sites.
Chi.mp is a free service.
The paid .tel product will allow its subscribers to control which networks their contacts reach them on, if I understand the preview info I saw correctly. Telnic also has a plan in place to allow people to claim their name -- a critical function, since there can be only one BobSmith.tel.
While I think the idea of using a top-level domain with a vanity URL as personal calling card is a gimmick -- unless there's only one TLD, which there clearly won't be -- the idea that every person can have a permanent location on the Net that's about who they are and not what they do does make some sense. And maybe we need that destitation to not be a social site like Facebook. Maybe it needs to be, basically, unsocial. My site, by me, for you -- under my control. Social site profiles do allow that, but they don't feel the same. But it's also quite possible that the subtle difference between appearing to own a site and owning a slice of another site isn't enough to sustain this new idea.
For my part, I bought rafeneedleman.com ages ago (I don't update it anymore). I'm also holding the .com domain names of my wife and son in reserve, just in case. These personal .coms don't t have the functionality of the services I discuss here but perhaps that points to a workable alternate business model: Provide contact and aggregation features that people like me can use from domains they already have.
See also: .name.
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