lunes, 26 de julio de 2010

A pesar de todo, yo sigo creyendo en los .tel

Putting the final nail to the .TEL .COffin

 

.CO is 100% Colombian TLD with an international flavor and worldwide reach.

When the .TEL TLD came out of the ICANN stables it was supposed to be a revolutionary new method of establishing a new identity online.

Adding to the launch hoopla was the infamous Ben.tel video depicting two hormone-laden Brits fighting for the attention of an uptown blonde – all while riding an intercity train. The one who scribbled "Ben.tel" on the window with his opponent's latte won the girl.

He might as well have scribbled the .tel domain with feces.

Once out of the limelight, dot tel was proven to be not only insufficient in providing basic elements expected from a TLD but also extremely weak with regards to search engine visibility.

In essence, TelNIC – the .tel Registry – brought out a product that was never ready to be used by the unsuspecting public, who rushed to register every serious or silly keyword under the sun, only to see their investment vaporize during the 1st year anniversary;  upon renewal time, .tel domains dropped en masse.

We can't blame TelNIC for improving on the initial model: they replaced the ugly .tel button with something that looks more appealing but didn't provide space for one's own image. They replaced the masked proxy forwarding and added space for AdSense.

Errr, that's it pretty much.

The Achilles tendon of .tel has always been its DNS: locked down to displaying the massive amount of personal data stored in the TelNIC database, there has been no alternate provision in order to host a dot tel in a separate DNS or to park domains for that matter.

It needs to be noted that TelNIC carries on, undaunted; a few weeks ago they launched the IDN .tel domains – as if we need international users to obtain their own castrated .TEL domains. At least, that led to several new registrations after the anniversary dive in existing .tel numbers.

And now, .CO is here – at the worst time for .tel, putting the final nail to the dot tel coffin.

There is no comparison between the two: Dot CO is a letter shy of .com and brings forth a full-fledged TLD that can be parked, developed and most importantly it will rate well with search engines such as Google.

Sometimes we wonder where is the .TEL blonde these days now that the .CO brunette from Colombia controls the game.

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