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New .tel functionality released

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Today, we’ve updated the .tel service with the following features as referred to in our September newsletter.

1)  Mobile Search for Directories

We’ve rolled out an update to the search functionality on mobile devices. Those community members with complex .tel domains or directories and which choose the ‘Search this .tel’ option rather than the ‘Search all’ option will now see that the search box appears at the top of the smart phone view.  This should assist those seeking information within your .tels to access the search functionality much more quickly, rather than having to scroll down to the bottom of the page (potentially through 100 different records).

The ‘Search all’ option still provides the search box at the bottom of the page, as it is more likely that the viewer will take a look through the contents of that .tel prior to deciding whether to seek the information from another source.

2)  .tel Redirection

If you’re a brand owner or have a portfolio of related .tel domains and you don’t want all of them to be found online or have the time to populate all of them now, help is now at hand.  You may have purchased multiple .tel variants or defensive registrations, but you don’t want all of these to be seen or don’t want to put duplicate content in (not a good idea from a search engine perspective).

Now, all you need to do is list the main .tel that you wish to promote within the .tel domains that you don’t want to use right now.  This will result in the visitor being diverted to your main .tel if they type in one of your other .tel names into the browser or discover it some other way.

Remember, this will only work if there’s nothing else in the .tel domain that you wish to divert automatically to your chosen main .tel domain, so make sure that the domain you wish to divert has no other content in it.  You can also divert it to a sub-page of another domain, but it won’t divert to any other domain extension – this is specifically a feature for managing multiple .tel domains.

3)  Rich Snippets

We’ve updated the way in which .tel presents this information within the template, which should deliver even better information back to Google and as a result, present even better information back to the person searching so they can click on the .tel to proceed with their search.

4)  Support for more third party icons

We’ve updated support for more third party services on the .tel, looking at feedback from the community and actual usage of these services listed in the .tel domains.

 

We are still working on the final item listed in the September newsletter, the new templates and we will provide a development update in the next newsletter due out this month.

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Curation: The key to online reputation

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

Those ‘embedded’ within the social media ecosystem have long talked of curation as the killer application that will provide the disruptive force to shift old-school industries into submission or ‘pivot’.  Recently, prolific naughties blogger Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion fame and now consultant at Edelman Public Relations refreshed the debate by moving it into the applications space from the social web.  His argument was that, with the ease and access to apps, whilst the likes of the music industry have already been disrupted through free-to-stream music services that enable people to listen to curated pick lists, now traditional media outlets are being faced by a dilution of their brand through the curation of content from them through new apps for tablets and smart phones.

An Ancient Skill

The fundamental fact is that this type of curation is not new.  In 1996, a small research project that then turned into a search engine called Google, provided an algorithmic curation of web pages presented to the user when searching for ‘relevant’ information (or simply one result if they were ‘feeling lucky’!).  Whilst the format has stayed the same substantially since then, with automation and algorithms at the heart of the service, it’s a poorly-kept secret that Google employs thousands to make sure that the results expected to be delivered are maintained.

In the late 1990s, TiVo started enabling this type of curation of content on television, based on programmes watched, and enabling people to cut out or fast-forward through adverts.  Television did not die; instead, new technology providers sprang up to provide different types of channels based on genres, with services like Virgin Media and Sky in the UK providing ‘on demand’ television.

In music, radio stations for years have been curating music choices, picked by DJs.  Themed channels have also been around for a long time.

Curation, Distributed

What has changed is the ability for anyone to curate some form of content or culture easily.  In the same way that blogging on free platform enabled anyone to start curating information on the web and providing opinion on it, now the medium has changed to enable people to more easily (but yet not simply) create applications that can be downloaded to devices and share that curated content.

Curation in and of itself is not the creation of social media.  Those with access to cheap and standardized technology – pamphleteers in the 1640s for example – were able to curate and present information.  What has changed is the ability to reach a broad audience and, by association, be discovered by like-minded individuals, opposing factions (whether trolls or Governments) or potential customers.

The act of curation and the ability to curate is open to all, and that is the fundamental point.  The scarcity value of information and content – whether it be music, opinion or indeed contact information – has been unlocked, never to be placed back into the box.  Each and every individual with access to an internet connection and a device has the power to begin curation and stands every chance of being ‘liked’, +1’d or shared so that the message is distributed virally far and wide (or indeed to a small, confined community).

Marketing by Curation

No small business or individual professional today should consider themselves to be marketing themselves appropriately if they leave curation of their brand or online reputation to a third party.

Where once the purpose of a press release was to engage and inform the media (which at the time were the only channel which had the power and the reach to influence the people you wanted to communicate with), now it stands as a tool for search engine optimization to be directly discoverable as a piece of editorial by potential employers, partners or customers.

Equally important is the curation of the ways in which people can contact you.  It’s critically important to make sure that your contact information is (securely) up-to-date in the distributed nature of the global business environment.  Curation is potentially the most important tool of any individual or small business today.  Make it work for you.

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TelChina CEO triumphs in Business Awards

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

We’re delighted to share the news that Lucy Wang, CEO of TelChina, won a significant award this week.

On March 27th, the 10th Awarding Ceremony for the Top Ten Businesswomen in China was staged in Beijing. Lucy was awarded the title of “Prominent New Businesswomen”. This event was run by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce.  The event selects the most accomplished female entrepreneurs in China.

It’s already garnered a host of press coverage and so we congratulate Lucy on her accomplishments in such a relatively short space of time, with TelChina being less than a year old. For more information, see local press.

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Whose Identity is it Anyway?

Monday, March 7th, 2011

I was at the cinema recently and saw a preview for Liam Neeson’s new film ‘Unknown’.  Predictably, to me at least, it seems that Mr. Neeson plays one of his two stock roles; arch-nemesis or, as is in this case, driven character either in a situation of peril or jeopardy or seeking a close relative in such state.  His character in this film apparently wakes from a coma to find that someone else has stolen his identity and not even his wife believes him.

Like the plot for this film, identity as an issue seems to crop up every couple of years.  Like the critics’ opinions on Mr. Neeson’s latest adventure, there’s a mixture of responses as to what the answer to the tricky issue of identity and identity theft ‘should’ be.

What is clear is that there are a number of commercial and large-scale projects ongoing around the world that are trying to address this in a concerted fashion; far more concerted it has to be said than in previous years.  What is interesting is looking at why this is happening and what people feel about this.  There’s no doubt that with the increase in life online, there’s a battle for ownership of identity.

Money Never Sleeps?

Like all consumer technology advances these days, two of the main drivers in the consumer space when it comes to identity seem to be from Facebook and Apple.  Did you miss those?  You may well have done.  Recently, Apple godfather Steve Jobs announced in the iPad 2 launch event that there were now something in the region of 200 million credit cards stored in the iTunes/App Store.  A financial link to a user is obviously an incredibly powerful way of validating who that person is (unless the card is stolen, in which case, that identity will either be short-lived or the person using it to purchase goods or services will soon be relocating to a secure facility).  Given the fact that less than 25% of people alive today have a bank account, this isn’t necessarily the best way of validating identity.

At the same time, in late February, Facebook rolled out Facebook Comments.  Billed as an attempt to enable sites to clean up their comment spam, those wishing to comment on an article with Facebook Comments enabled now have to sign in either using Facebook Connect or Yahoo! ID.  This obviously impacts on whether or not you’d wish to associate yourself with a comment on the site.  With over 550 million users, one would think that this identity provision would scale.  Facebook is obviously keen for people to be who they say they are, as advertising revenue increasingly funds its growth and success and the value behind that is the real-life data gathered in the biggest Truman Show experiment ever.

Both of these models seem based on the individual as a consumer and the value of that consumer to the ecosystem around the devices (in Apple’s case) or the platform (in Facebook’s case).  The first is tapping in to the cash that can be directly extracted from the consumer through providing very simple one-click verification of a transaction, however small.  The second is tapping into the value around the transactions – both financial and interaction-based – that the consumer undertakes and how that impacts on their friends, family and associates.

Face/Off?

Whilst not describing themselves as identity solutions, the implicit aspect is that this is what they are intended to be.  But these systems are built on transactions – What do I buy? What am I commenting on? – inside their own ecosphere.  This isn’t useful outside of that particular walled garden – there’s no personal continuity presented; how someone acts and the persona they are on Facebook may be completely different from whom they are at work.  Indeed, again, people are modifying their behavior when it comes to commenting using Facebook Comments.

Both solutions seem to be changing habits and activity (buying more things, commenting less) online, rather than driving understanding of what people actually need to do (have control over my credit card spending, making an anonymous snarky comment about something to let off steam right now).  This is forcing change on people through a technology service dependent on the moral structure of the service provider.  Many people feel fine about this; they live their lives in public and don’t understand why people might not wish to do the same as a default.  Even reading articles about being stalked on FourSquare don’t seem to deter them.  The problem is that when choice seems to be taken out of the equation as controls get more and more confusing for normal people, the default setting of privacy becomes ‘off’ because it’s too hard to set to ‘on’ and there’s an assumption that if something happens, it will be resolved by the service provider.

Cue the Sun!

In a time when the US government is seeking to encourage people to have a unique online identity in order to interact with Government services online, and having recently sat down with both Jobs and Zuckerberg at lunch, the drive towards online identity is front of mind for Governments.  It’s not just the United States.

The question is, will the systems that are chosen (driven by commercial organizations) inevitably change the individual?  Will we all, like Liam Neeson, wake up one day from a coma to find out that our identity has been taken away from us?  Not by another individual, but by a system that has been introduced as ‘best fit’, that changes who we are by changing what we do because of the lack of flexibility and individual control that we have being represented by that identity system?

Let’s hope there’s enough time to think this through.  I may just have to go and see Unknown now to see how Hollywood has it ending.  I’m certainly hoping it’s more Truman Show than Brazil.

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Navigating change

Monday, January 17th, 2011

Or: controlling contact points in a changing marketing environment

A colleague recently sent me a link to a blog post regarding the New York Times’ celebration of its 80-year anniversary in 1931. It commissioned the leading business, scientific and philosophical thinkers of the time and asked them to predict what the world would look like in 80 years time, so what 2011 would look like.  Whilst a selection of these is only available here and I hope more will be released by the NYT soon, some of those predictions highlights are incredibly close, and I’d encourage you to read them at your leisure.

What struck me when reading these was, not that each and every one of them had applied their minds to something so far beyond them as to imagine a world that they would never be able to see, but to understand that all of their predictions came from a fundamental notion that the one constant that they could rely on was change.

Who’s going to drive you home tonight?

In 2010, we’re so used to change, we perhaps forget that it is happening at all!  Incremental change and incremental innovation surround us, perhaps nowhere moreso than within the technology and devices that are inherently changing our lives at a microscopic level.  Gesture-based gaming, internet connectivity in airplanes, touch screen smart phones, self-driving cars (OK, some not so small changes in that last one!) have all emerged and crept up on us over the past two or three years, making us think how on earth we survived before they were around.

And yet, in all of this, the need to remember that things can change and change quickly seems to have been forgotten when it comes to our perspective within business and communications.  One of very few lone voices caught our attention here at Telnic highlighting the potential concern of forgetting that change is inevitable.  A recent post by Tim Schumacher over at SEDO clearly and comprehensively outlined the threat to businesses (and indeed, professionals) of believing in the hype of social networks in being all-powerful and omnipresent and committing brand suicide by “advertising their Facebook landing pages, Twitter handles or even their iPhone applications”on billboards.

Smile and the whole world smiles with you

Don’t get me wrong.  Social media is fantastic at many things and driving interest, awareness and, in some instances, sales is much easier in the connected marketplace.  The reach and acceleration of communication, some good, some bad, has at no other time had such an impact on people’s awareness and ability to communicate what they think about particular brands than through social media platforms.

What is not so positive is the level of immersion to which brands, often guided by those who are being paid to promote the business rather than to secure their long-term future, are being held.  By ceding control of your direct relationship with your customers, the Emperor’s new clothes of today becomes the company that sheds its existing brand and adopts the transparent overcoat of social media, exposing what’s left behind and with the salesman of the overcoat pointing and laughing all the way to the next customer!

No brand, large or small, needs to lose control to this extent.  Tim’s clear articulation of the threat and his summary point to the fact that these are “proprietary walled-garden approaches” and thus are not directly addressable from the open web.  This is fair enough and completely true; any independence is ceded to these so-called networks and it is a requirement that in order to connect, you join and play by their rules (which they can change at any time), effectively putting a middle-man in control of your relationship with potential fans or customers.  If this is the future of doing business, why are many companies that have previously sold through indirect channels trying to set up direct models now?

Danger, Will Robinson!

Not only is it dangerous to lose control of the point of contact with your customer (and sometimes the connection completely, as per the recent downtime for Facebook  - I wonder how many customers were lost to those advertising solely their Facebook pages on television that day?), but it’s also dangerous to forget the change factor.  Social media is of course today the darling of the web, but just how long is that going to last?  Facebook and QQ are dominant networks in their regions, but so is Skype in terms of size (and in terms of the risks that one proprietary network faces – do we see a trend here?).  What happens if charging models change for internet access or companies or Governments decide that the productivity of the country or organization is at stake (Facebook is the most blocked site on the internet according to a recent study by one DNS service provider, closely followed by MySpace)?  What happens if, heaven forbid, today’s social network de jour becomes tomorrow’s Friendster or Friends Reunited?  Suddenly, your business is a piece of furniture in an empty house where the party goers have gone somewhere cooler, and you’re put out in a yard sale.

Time waits for nobody

Back to Tim at SEDO: “Providers can go out of business, and there is no regulative environment in place.  Seems unlikely? Remember FortuneCity or Geocities?  They were the over-hyped early predecessors of social communities offering easy site hosting.  Nevertheless, Yahoo terminated Geocities in 2009 – after having bought it for a whopping $2.87 billion in 1999.”

The sad fact is that in the online industry, $2.87 billion is small change in the VC world, but back then it was a significant investment.  We’re seeing market valuations of ten times that number when we talk about today’s leading social network.  But we’ve also seen that even in the case of the largest financial institutions, no organization is ‘too big to fail’ any more.  With the recent down-sizing of MySpace in an attempt to provoke a sale, these timescales for failure seem to be compacting.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (turn to face the strain)

So the key to all of this is to accept and plan for change.  One way of doing that is to insure against being overly damaged by that change.  Ownership of your points of contact, as Tim says, is critical in all of this.  It costs little to own your own domain name and renew it annually.  It costs little more than time to own and use a .tel as a point of contact whilst still enjoying the noise and fun that participating in social media is today whilst it’s free and whilst it continues to drive business.  Planning for change is critical to survival.  As Professor Peter Drucker wrote, coincidentally in a book published in 1999, “Everybody has accepted by now that change is unavoidable. But that still implies that change is like death and taxes — it should be postponed as long as possible and no change would be vastly preferable. But in a period of upheaval, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm.”

Now that’s one piece of advice that shouldn’t change over time.

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The Internet Of Things? Discoverability first!

Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

One of the hot buzzwords (or buzz phrases, to be more precise) today is “The Internet of things”; the interconnection of all sorts of everyday objects. The idea is that, in the near future, one can envision that a proliferation of sensors and outputs will make even the most mundane object a useful node on the Internet.

For example, your fridge notifying you via your communications channel of choice that the amount of liquids stored in it has dropped below minimum levels (or, spoken more plainly: “you’re running out of beer!”). Or being able to tell the temperature in a specific locality by visualizing a map of all the locally available networked temperature sensors: those in your neighbours’ cars, by windows, and so on.  Or, in the most recent case highlighted by Google’s announcement of its self-driving cars, traffic flow and incident, moving objects (people, bicycles or parcels) tracked in real time.

The Location of Things

The technology to build the Internet of things is available today. Beyond the obvious cost overhead to build a network component to all those objects, the main issue is how to network them. In order to network them, you of course need to give them a location address.

Using good old IPv4 addresses is out of the question, as we’ve essentially all but run out of them.  This isn’t a problem for .tel domains as of course they’re not needed to host websites, but it could well be a challenge for the rest of the domain industry in 2011 unless there’s a wholesale migration to IPv6, which has been around for a long time.

Naming Requirements and Discoverability

However, regardless of IPv6 address adoption at present, we have plenty! Imagine every single device having an IP address, and from there, an actual name. Take for example thermometer.floor1.house.john.smith.com. That’s a good start, but how will we know what that device can do? How will other devices be told how to communicate with it? What can thermometer.floor1 offer to the Internet at large? In more technical terms, the problem is that of discovering the device and its API (an application programming interface, which is an interface implemented by a software program to enable interaction with other software).

A Network of Hubs

Using IP addresses and the DNS can solve this problem very elegantly, using the techniques .tel has perfected; leveraging the DNS infrastructure to expose communication channels and entry points.

Here’s a concrete example: Assume I own a Ford GT and a fridge. Both are fully networked and both are full of really neat sensors. I could set up my .tel domain to not only let someone (securely) discover the existence of these machines, but also what they can do.  Here’s how I’d set up my .tel domain:

fridge.devices.henri.tel would have records like:

x-temp:http+x-inside => http://fe80::222:41ff:fefa:e3ba/temp/

x-pwr:http => http://fe80::222:41ff:fefa:e3ba/power/

and fordgt.devices.henri.tel could have records similar to the below:

x-temp:http+x-outside => http://fe80::222:41ff:fefa:e3be/deg/

x-vol:http => http://fe80::222:41ff:fefa:e3be/gastank/

where both fridge and Ford GT would update their location (LOC) records in real time (obviously the fridge wouldn’t move too much, but hopefully the Ford would).

Of course these are just hypothetical records, but anyone defining an x-temp service type could specify how that would work over http. For example, appending “get_temp” to the url could return the temperature of the sensor.

Some Examples

Imagine two scenarios.  I have a service contract with the supplier of my fridge and I have given that service provider the rights to access fridge.devices.henri.tel  and the information stored under it.  Their servicing software can access the fridge on a regular basis to make sure that it is performing appropriately and, if a temperature fluctuation occurs, alert me to that (I may have left the fridge door open) so that I can take action or, if there’s a prolonged issue, fix a service appointment to find out what the problem is and fix it, all automatically and proactively.

The second scenario is a public service one.  The records in fordgt.devices.henri.tel I’ve set to public.  As Google crawls my .tel domain, it finds these devices and takes the opportunity to read the temperature from these sensors, and inserts those data points in its map using their respective LOC records. Instant real-time, on-the-ground temperature monitoring, enabling open data to be accessed and manipulated to provide better information services to all.

Obviously, in these two cases, the access is set by the owner of both the fridge and the car.  With .tel, the individual is in control of the information being shared and is able to set access levels dependent on their relationship with vendors or other service providers and revoke that access at any time.  Thus, concerns regarding privacy and data protection can be managed at a personal level, rather than with systems thrust upon them.

What’s likely?

Whilst sounding like science fiction, these scenarios are not far off.  There are already developed initiatives for home systems management that are being rolled out today in order to better manage energy efficiency and automated home management.  Devices are already becoming internet aware at an increasing rate.  As any type of record can be stored in the DNS and it’s of course possible to write to .tel domains via APIs today and monitor, if not manage, these devices.  So a personal or home .tel domain can be the data store and interface between multiple devices and sensors in the future, enabling tight control of information being shared privately or publicly at the choice of the individual.

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Local Search and .tel

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

With Local Search being a hot topic in 2010, how can a .tel help you promote your skills or your business online?  Well, .tel is the first domain with local at its heart.

Why?

LOC(K) in the location

Firstly, one of the key things that all .tel domains have the ability to provide a location record quickly and simply.  Many small businesses struggle with this when building their own websites.  .tel makes this an extremely simple task.  It then becomes ingrained in the essential information stored in a .tel; the contact information and descriptive content is contextualized also by a location record.  This makes it especially juicy for search engines when looking at relevant content to serve up.

Micro-formatted information

Secondly, as the .tel automatically publishes micro-formats such as hCard which help software to identify labeled content and handle it better, Google can take this location information and the contact and context information and understand its relevance in its entirety.  If a keyword is Silicon Valley and the location record matches, this is relevant and useful information for a local search.

Relevant content for all devices

Thirdly, as a .tel domain is automatically formatted in the right way for every device, it becomes a customer-friendly single point of contact that customers can use to then decide how they interact with the company; it instantly provides customers with a choice of ways of interacting.  This is crucial when exploring new ways of interacting with customers who might want to check in on Foursquare, interact on Twitter or write a review on Qype.  With so many interaction points, a company can remind a customer of all of the places they might be able to interact on a .tel, thus making much better use of those touchpoints from an ROI perspective.

Local in the real world

Finally, a .tel can be used in local outdoor or interactive advertising to bring customers to relevant information, interaction points or offers.  As the .tel can be populated ‘on the fly’ from mobile devices, information can be changed very quickly. Thus, a local offer that is running for one hour only for local shoppers can be switched on and off without any hassle.

One enhancement you might consider if you’re a local business is using TelAds to provide offers and vouchers for your customers.  There’s been an incredible growth in the past couple of years in terms of customers wanting to use coupons to gain great deals.  Many of the services out there today however have too many hidden terms and conditions and leave very little profit left.  Using free third party services to populate your TelAds with time-limited vouchers or offers for first-time customers, will provide you with the ability to drive further revenue.  In 2011, we’ll be making this even easier by providing a special voucher record which you’ll be able to populate from within the control panel.

With the price of a .tel averaging at $15 per year, and the power of instant information at people’s fingertips, customer service and coupon offers, search engine optimization, mobile access from any device and location at the heart of the domain, .tel is a perfect solution for Local Search.

The proof is in the pudding

When we write that .tel is juicy for search engines, it isn’t just wishful thinking, or some kind of sales pitch. Many initiatives at Telnic and independently in the .tel community have repeatedly shown by the numbers that .tel domains are some of the most powerful (and certainly cheapest!) search engine optimization (SEO) you can achieve.

Telnic is currently undergoing a study with a large yellow page provider in the US to look at the value of providing .tel domains to their customers.  Whilst Google has only indexed the .tel domains in the past three weeks, the results have been dramatic.  Both Google and Bing, at the time of writing, are presenting over 50% of the domains indexed in the top 15 results for named search, with 39% of .tel domains being ranked in the first 10 results in Google and 44% of .tel domains being ranked in the first 10 results in Bing.

The speed of indexing and the authority given to such a young extension shows the power of .tel, even without significant SEO attributes such as cross-linking being performed during these tests.  We hope to share more from this and other trials in the coming months.  Do let us know if you’re getting good results as well.

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Developments in OAuth and OpenID

Friday, June 4th, 2010

Two of the things we’re working on at present to enhance .tel services are integrating OAuth (Open Authentication) and OpenID into .tel.  I’m personally excited about this as I think that this will bring huge benefits to many people and realize a vision for .tel that encourages people to see it, not as a traditional domain name, but as more of a communications solution.

Moving from a web-view to a multi-modal view

The majority of the work done to date is with the traditional web and mobile web in mind.  To an extent, this has been driven by a requirement that .tel is still being perceived, purchased and utilized as a traditional domain.  This may be due to its relative ease of set-up and its pure functionality – that of providing information online in a basic format for easy discovery and access.  It can be set up in minutes, is accessible from mobile devices ‘out of the box’ and now, with the support of AdSense and TelAds, can provide a revenue stream in addition to the contact information displayed that many find easy and simple to action.

But this is not the ultimate vision of .tel.  The above functionality will be enhanced, tweaked and supported as we move forward of course.  However, the use of DNS for storing of that information is the power behind the vision for .tel.  As it’s stored as data, it can be accessed, manipulated and utilized by many means.  As can be seen from the applications we’ve developed for the iPhone and Android, .tel is the first domain that can be managed completely from mobile devices.  With the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Outlook applications, one can lookup contact information from the DNS without leaving your address book, and import it there and then also.  And through third party soft phone applications, the same can be done, enabling the global directory to serve really fast contact information that is updated in real time.

Moving from online to offline access

All of this is done with an internet connection.  We must remember however that there are instances where we may be without internet connectivity (my iPhone service drops out even at major London train stations) and many in other countries with either no or low access to the internet, either through coverage, government regulation or poverty.

This is where it becomes interesting.  With OAuth support, services can be linked together without having to share usernames and passwords, creating a strong bond which will then allow .tel and other services to interact.  This we know will help those in the community who are developing management solutions for .tel to provide a trusted online service and we hope deliver them much success.  But at the same time, it will enable ‘offline’ services to interact with .tel.

What do I mean by this?  There is a proof of concept running on Twitter (see http://twitter.com/2tel) at present which shows Henri Asseily and my .tel names being managed by Twitter, and the both of us looking up information from other .tel names.  OK, fine, Twitter is an online service.  But what we’re actually doing is managing our .tel names and looking up .tel information via the Twitter SMS gateway.  We’re simply using the Twitter service as a bridge at present to enable us to utilize their SMS gateway to do this.  It could quite easily be a stand-alone SMS gateway.  OAuth will therefore enable .tel owners who don’t have continuous access to the internet to manage their names, and enable those with no internet access at all to access real-time updates from .tel names via SMS.  The first top level domain you can access and update without an internet connection.

This is what excites me.  I have to admit, I’m excited because I came up with the idea.  But if I can come up with that idea (and I’m not a real technologist, I just like and talk about technology) then what can the real technologists come up with?  The future of OAuth and binding .tel names to SMS I think provides a significant opportunity to telecommunications companies to begin to offer these to their customers, and a compelling business model for them to embed these into their offerings.  There is a huge market out there of people who wish to be found online but don’t have access to the internet all the time; India is just one of those markets and virtually all communication is done by SMS or mobile.

Moving towards a single uniform identity that you can own

At the same time, OpenID will also provide a compelling case for .tel to start to become used as an identifier for people online.  Many people don’t have the skills or desire to build a website of their own.  They use free services – Blogger, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook – to communicate with people when they want to (as well as still SMS, which remains the biggest surprise to mobile companies who never expected it to be successful as a communications tool).  But at the same time, we increasingly see that individuals need a place they can ‘own’ online – the ‘go to’ resource so that, if they leave one or more social networks, they won’t lose their ‘social graph’ (or, in non-jargon, the friends they really want to keep in touch with whom they re-discovered through the social network).  Additionally, the pervasiveness of these services and networks is leading to complexities in remembering usernames and passwords for all of these services (especially if security is front of mind).  OpenID makes a .tel domain the username that people can utilize to sign in to other services.  It then provides one place to bind all services together, and also an increase in the ability for people to utilize their .tel names more than just as a web address to give to people.  Sure, you can get a free OpenID from third-party service providers, but you’re back to the same problem; how long can they continue to provide this as a free service, or as a service at all, without a revenue stream?  With .tel becoming an OpenID provider, you own your domain – it’s not yourname.openidprovider.com, it’s simply yourname.tel.

So I believe the next six months will open up the ability for existing owners to re-engage and potential owners to re-evaluate .tel as more than just a web-based service, and I’m looking forward to seeing the developments that existing members of the community and new participants will develop.

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Is 2010 the end of ‘free’?

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

With the global recession’s milk teeth dropping out, some much sharper ones have replaced them, or so it seems.  As economies struggle with sovereign debt, there’s a general sense that we might be getting to a stage that there’s not enough money to go around.  And it seems to be starting to impact on the services that many of us take for granted – and take for free.

Some social networks that were the shining example of social media just two years ago are struggling.  Take Bebo in the UK for example, which at one stage was larger than MySpace UK and which was subsequently acquired by AOL.  Founder Michael Burke sold Bebo in 2008 for 850 million dollars.  Having invested so much, it has been left to wither on the vine, prompting an announcement from AOL earlier this year saying that it was looking for a buyer.  If one is not found by the end of May, it’s likely that Bebo will be shuttered and will join the dead-pool.

Other social networking sites are taking heed in this change of temperature.  It takes revenue to create a momentum, and that revenue was missing from Bebo after it was acquired.  It also takes a business model to get acquired in the first place, and some are finally waking up to the fact that their users are the ones that are the low-hanging fruit.  Take for example the recent announcement from Ning, the platform that enabled anyone to set up their niche social network for nothing.  Unless you’re an educational institution, it’s the end of the free ride, with fees from $3 to $50 per month to run a platform for your members and no free starter option.  This is a complete about-turn and has had some strong impacts on the favourability of its brand online.

Whilst this is a transparent move into a commercial business model, and one that is of course necessary for organizations to succeed in the long term, moving from a free to a paid-for model without any prior indication is a huge issue for people relying on the service to communicate with customers, partners or friends.  Ning however is not the only platform making this move.  This week, after purchasing and releasing ‘official’ Twitter apps for a number of different devices over the past month or so, Twitter also announced a change to its terms of service, stating that it would be blocking the injection of paid advertising into the twitter stream.  At present, this remains undefined and could quite possibly be used as a step into generating revenue from businesses using twitter in any way to profit from its services.  The difference with Twitter is that many have seen this move coming and others even speculate that a paid model by end users who don’t want to see adverts in their Twitter stream might also be a possibility.  Even so, with the success of Twitter and its increasing penetration in countries that don’t use the computer as the first point of entry to the internet, this business model by stealth again has a reputational issue and the uncertainty may turn both developers and ultimately end-users off.

There is of course another organization that is trying to create revenue from its users ‘by stealth’.  One cannot help also see Facebook’s flip-flopping over its privacy rules, “features” and controls, as well as its recent security scares with the integration of the Like button, sharing information with other sites on the web.  We know how it makes its money, and any attempt to close down information about users is going to impact on that ability.  If the issues are big enough to focus the attention of many Governments around the world, Facebook may just become – along with Google – this decade’s equivalent of Microsoft in the previous decade for legal wrangles.  These can be quite expensive and long-fought battles, and the revenue needs to be found to fight these from somewhere.

But do all of these signs add up to the end of ‘free’?  It’s perhaps a little too early to tell quite yet.  Certainly, there are many different services that provide basic free services with additional paid-for access to additional features or other low-cost communications channels.  But these again don’t command the same level of interest that ‘the big guns’ do from the media and consequently struggle to gain a large enough base in order to become a de facto standard that a majority of people can use as their main communications channel with confidence.

What this does lead to is that 2010 is going to be the year of further disruption in terms of communications choices.  As those disappointed that services are shut down (Bebo users are, it seems, very loyal) or charged for (the jury is still out from Ning’s users’ perspective), many are looking around for alternatives.  The question is, how willing are people to get burned by free services again when it comes to making a choice?  How easy is it for them to port their social graph to other services?  How important is it now to people to be discoverable through more than one service?  And how much investment have they made in terms of their time in investing on those services that the now, for one reason or another, cannot use?

So perhaps whilst this still may not be the end of free, it may well be the beginning of the end of trust in free to be around for as long as people want it to be.  And that trust is an important factor in being able to commit to services with time and value invested in those services.  At the end of the day, it’s interesting to note that recent statistics showed that US teens now prefer texting over any other form of communication with their friends.  Certainly not a free service, but one that’s established a level of trust worth the investment.

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What’s your online reputation like?

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Currently, a number of eminent thinkers are releasing thoughts on reputation and engagement online. In past few weeks and months, books and businesses which have obviously taken time to gestate in the minds of people coming from several different directions have been announced.  What is interesting is that they seem to be converging on a central thesis, explicit or otherwise, that, like Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, search is becoming, if not has become, the central player in understanding and defining what is true. That truth, whether it be about the collective listing of information about who a person is, or the collective sentiment about what people feel about a particular business or product, is being defined by trust developed on the basis of search rankings, the popularity of the sources and the ability to interpret individual pieces of information within the context of the sum of search.  This means that, whether consuming or promoting, everyone is in the search business, either pulling or pushing, these days.

The most recent piece to emerge is from ex-Financial Times journalist Tom Foremski, who postulates that ‘Every Company is a Media Company’ (EC=MC) in his new thesis which he writes about here.  His position is clear; regardless of the business you are in, you’re also in the business of media publishing.  Content, communications through social media, advertising in the non-traditional sense, open customer services models letting the world see you deal with your customers in a transparent way, reacting and acting online to maintain positive feeling with your existing customers and utilizing fan pages to grow your potential customer base.  All of these are employed with increasing energy as businesses transform into what they need to in order to survive in the competitive marketplace that has become global and virtual.  And if you’re not publishing, and controlling, what you want people to see, or engaging in the conversation, you’re not long for this world in business terms.

From a completely different angle, taking the individual and non-technical perspective, Antony Mayfield, an ex-PR man and now VP of i-Crossing here in the UK, has come up with a constructive discussion of the importance of managing one’s own ‘web shadow’ – the sum of the parts of the internet that you once played with and forgot, blended with the sum of the parts of the internet that other people played with tagging you in a photo of a drunken party, with a dash of some of the professional stuff you might have done or still do, all served up without empathy on Google’s front page.  Luckily for most, Antony also outlines what you can do about it even if you’re not technical, in his excellent and thoughtful book Me and My Web Shadow.

Stuck in between the large organizations and the individuals, are 90% (if not more) of the rest of the business world.  Small and medium-sized businesses at a loss to understand how to deal with all of this reputation and search stuff, knowing the importance of being found online but struggling with the time-poor aspects of developing and growing business from a day-to-day perspective.  Luckily again, another book This is Social Media, written by business journalist Guy Clapperton, outlines in a very simple way, what can and can’t be achieved with various social networks and technologies.

What it comes down to is this.  No longer can you take the chance to ignore search results.  There’s little or no time to be able to retrospectively fix negative customer sentiment already on the web, but it’s not too late to begin to engage.  Skins need to be thickened.  Sleeves need to be rolled up.  Taking control is not out of the reach of the individual job-seekers concerned about employers finding negative impressions of them on social networks, nor is making sure that you can be found as high up the search results in order to be the authoritative source of information about you.  Businesses can take control of all of the ways in which they can interact with different constituents and be more open on the internet whilst maximizing their investments in their social media channels.

The time is definitely right to look at a .tel name as a way to help with all of these issues, especially, but not exclusively, if you’re not technically inclined.  Online reputation matters – it’s time to do something about it.

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