[uf-discuss] .tel

[Tom Morris]

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 16:58, Tim White <tjameswhite at gmail.com> wrote:
> Has anyone seen the upcoming .tel domains (http://telnic.org/)? Seems
> like a perfect spot for hCard.
>

<div class="rant personal-opinion">The whole thing is highly idiotic
and if there's any justice in the world, it'll completely fail and
become the butt of jokes for years to come. If we can steer people
towards using hCard, geo and other open solutions, that would be far
preferable to a poorly thought-out system. Telephony is more like a
protocol than a domain. Can you imagine .email, .irc, .rss or .ssh
TLDs? It's that stupid.</div>

People should just put a representative hCard on their homepage and
then have a thing to parse it out and dial it. I've been meaning to
build a JavaME thing to do this for my phone, so I can fire up my
phone, type a domain name and have the phone dial it automatically.

Imagine "starbucks.tel" - what number will it return via DNS?
Presumably a corporate number. But if you designed the main site
right, you could have it so that a person could use subdomains or
directories to get the relevant branches: chicago.starbucks.com (or
starbucks.com/chicago) could return a page full of hCards with
addresses for branches in that city. Then build the client software
for the phones which would be able to look for phone numbers on
websites and then call them or add them to the address book. This kind
of thing is far more useful in my opinion.

-- 
Tom Morris
http://tommorris.org/