Exploring .tel – a communications profile parallel to the internet

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Okay, this is going to be a bit tricky to explain, so pay attention. Telnic is a company who own the .tel domain name. Never heard of it? That’s okay – it’s not publicly available yet. It’s basically a global contacts database for people. You register a domain, like http://henry.tel/, and it acts as a central repository for all the different ways people can contact you.

You can save URLs, email addresses, phone numbers, usernames, locations – all sorts. You can also specifiy keywords that describe you – for example I might write “blogger”, “technology” and “DJ” there. Each has a clickable link which will open it in any service that you specify. For example, you can just click on a Skype username, and it’ll try and open Skype to call it…