Wednesday, December 3. 2008

.Tel Sales Open Today; Implications for Location?

The news is covered in many places, but the New York Times Bits blog highlights how .Tel can, in addition to being a holding place for phone numbers, e-mail addresses and the like could also be a holding place for location information.

Individuals can also choose to display their location, allowing their contacts to see where they are at any given time and opening the door for location-based services.

The way this will work, as I understand it, instead of "saving" a phone number in your address book for an individual/company, you'd save their .tel domain. Thus whenever they update anything - phone number in this case - you address book is updated. The same for their location.

For now only trademarked names are for sale; the rest of us can buy (expensively) in Feb and (less expensively) in March.