You're right, but had it not been so restrictive would people have used it for its core purpose? There are a bunch of other reasons it hasn't caught on. But at this stage I think their best move would be to ask ICANN whether they can liberalise the extension.. I imagine the community would back it.
The .tel TLD was established for the purpose of publishing contact/location and other meta info at the DNS level, but it hasn't yet caught on unfortunately.
This is partly why I'm so interested in publishing information at the DNS level (i.e. .tel) - you get to use UDP (or TCP failover), plus other awesome benefits. You can do other innovative things with DNS too.
DNS is distributed, so I think you meant to say decentralised?
But I'm baffled as to why anybody would want to use it? For it to become useful we'd need to go to the extraordinary lengths of replacing substantial infrastructure, at a very great cost - to replace proven technology that scales extremely well?
And it wouldn't surprise me if Harold Camping was mining Bitcoins on the church computer. The end is nigh!
It doesn't surprise me that this is the first occasion you've heard about it :)
But all of the complexity is hidden. The API is standardised, so management apps and other services will always work, irrespective of who your domain registrar/TelHosting provider is.
I'm sure the majority of registrants have no idea they're publishing DNS records, or even what DNS is - and they don't need to know. The best technologies are the ones you don't necessarily see.
Non-technical people see a very simple and cost-effective way of establishing a simple online presence. For $10-$20 it's all-in - there's no web hosting or any technical expertise required. Small businesses love this. As such GoDaddy doesn't carry .tel, because it can't up-sell any of its other big-margin crap. But lots of YP publishers around the world are becoming .tel resellers :-)
I see it as a hugely disruptive technology with a good chance of success, but it seems more appealing to non-geeks than it does geeks at the moment. Once it gains popularity then geeks will start to catch on and realise all the cool stuff that's suddenly possible.
This is why I believe the .tel TLD is so important - DNS for people, no more carrier or service provider lock-in, stupid fast, and resilient.
I have about a dozen services defined under my name, some of which are private, which I can prioritise, or even change to a different profile depending on time/location.
Mobile operators are starting to adopt it, despite the fact it undermines their phone number lock-in, because it makes it much easier for them to roll out new data-driven services, e.g. China Mobile (600m subscribers) will use it for mobile payments.
It could be even more interesting if device manufacturers ever manage to persuade mobile operators to use virtual SIMs - imagine being able to subscribe to new networks on-the-fly!
I'm looking forward to decentralised microblogging, since then we can publish multiple feeds (RSS would seem ideal) from the same identity (domain), e.g. $ dig andy.tel naptr|grep rss - there'd also be a record to delegate a "hub" for my followers to subscribe to.
All the ludicrous claims about transforming commerce, toppling governments, etc. are starting to grate a little, and I thought this headline deliberately suggested a much more serious scenario than somebody going to speak at a tech conference in the Summer.
You're right, but "dishonesty" is a dirty word, despite not necessarily always being bad or immoral. It's up to journalists to perform balanced reporting. We trust them to do that.
Lazy journalists that simply rewrite press releases, emails from their friends, or otherwise fail to do any meaningful research are the ones truly deserving of the label "dishonest" (amongst others!).
That's a very good point, although it's changing; specialist registrars/resellers, directory publishers, and VOIP companies are all showing interest now. But I was thinking more about early adopters - the type of people who hang out on HN and register domains in their sleep :)
I heard Michael Jackson used to change his number on a biweekly basis. Would be quite interesting to see a survey on this group. See my other comment for a neat solution ;)
I'm a big fan of the .tel TLD for this, and other reasons: publish contact information dynamically, it's fast, reliable, gives you fine grained privacy controls, etc. etc.
I don't understand why this hasn't really caught on yet. The implications for the telco market would be huge if more people used DNS to its full potential.
There are many p2p networks for streaming content - they seem to be popular in Asia for watching English and European football, and I think many of these existed prior to 2007.
I'm sure there's a mountain of other prior art covering the concept. It isn't novel to anybody with half a brain. I was streaming audio in the 90s and clearly remember thinking about a p2p network then, because of the expense and legal threats I was receiving. All I wanted to do was enable football fans living abroad to listen to the local radio station on match days.. I thought I was doing the BBC a favour by extending their broadcast range! Yeah, I was just a naive kid. :)