Registeration for New Domain ".Tel" Starts Today

Starting today, companies and organizations can register with the new domain ".tel" which is being likened to an online phone book. People can browse to a person's or company's ".tel" website, and find a slew of information waiting for them such as contact information, phone numbers, fax numbers, email addresses, Social Site links, Instant Messaging links, and even links to virtual profiles like Second Life.

Another great aspect of this is that people can tell their Address Books to gather its information from the individual's/business's .tel domain. Then, when that individual/domain has to change their information (for whatever reason), they simply have to update their .tel website, and everyone who has directed their Address Books to that site will update automatically. No more sending out several hundred emails with updated information, knowing half your emails will be discarded or go unread.

Here's an example of the usefulness of .tel's:

Let's say you're working for the New York Times, and it's your job to handle any problems that your biggest customers have (whether it's regarding online services, distribution, or payments). Now let's say that for some reason or another, you are forced to change your phone number & email in the same day. You send out an email to your 100+ clients with your new info, but odds are it'll be at least a few days before everyone can update their Address Books.

However, if your clients had been directed to set their Address Books using your .tel site, all of their 100+ Address Books would update instantly!

Initially, registrars will charge ~ $400. Considering some of the major ".com" sites can be in the $10,000's, this seems like an extremely fair price. It's even rumored that smaller businesses can rent a .tel domain singularly (without any other domains like .com, .org, etc). These small businesses can even give a list of Keywords that search engines use when following users search requests. This allows for a cheap, low-maintenance website that still utilizes major search engines.

So basically, if time is money, linking all of your information to a single source (.tel) has the potential to save major dollars.

You can find more information at nytimes and wikipedia.