There have been a couple of developments both internally within Telnic and externally over the past few of days regarding viewing and using .tel information easily.
The first are two tools from developer Arthur Guy – thanks Arthur. Arthur has basically created a simple way for people who are browsing websites to quickly pull .tel contact information from .tel names linked to the site. The first is for Google Chrome and the second is for FireFox. Both plug-ins are easy and quick to install (with Firefox requiring a re-start). Both have an icon that shows that .tel name information is available (Google’s indicator is in the browser bar, whereas FireFox’s is down in the bottom right-hand side of the browser window) and both list all of the .tel names available having automagically verified that they are indeed real by doing a DNS lookup. Both of these plug-ins make it really easy for people to find and utilize contact information from .tel if website owners have linked their websites to this contact information, providing a really easy display of a live ‘contact us’ page integrated with a website but without the user having to navigate to another page to find the information. We’re really pleased that developers are starting to take an interest in .tel and really getting the idea of simple-to-pull contact information being useful to end users.
The Chrome extension can be found here: http://bit.ly/91DZ7k
Chrome extension showing .tel name lookup
The Firefox extension can be found here: http://bit.ly/cRR2FL
Firefox extension showing .tel lookup and button in browser bar
The second development is one that we’ve developed and which we are testing on our site. We’ve developed some code that will enable anyone trying to contact us to auto-populate a contact us form if they input their .tel name in the correct field. Of course, this is best demonstrated when there are more fields to fill in, so the sign up form for new resellers is a good one to play with (although please don’t submit the form unless you are interested as you will get an email back! There is a requirement to ‘confirm email’ so as long as you don’t fill this in and do accidentally press submit you should be safe).
Here’s a link to our partners sign-up page: http://telnic.org/partners-signup.html
The ability to sign up to further information simply by putting your .tel name into a form and it auto-populating would save a significant amount of time and hassle when filling out forms, dramatically increasing your chances of getting new customers. It could also be extremely useful for public sector services, charitable bodies and other service providers to help them keep up-to-date with current contact information by collecting their .tel names.
Technical bit: I’m told that the service is written in PHP and Javascript, and is available on request. The lookup is embeddable into existing web pages with only a few lines of javascript and HTML. Externally to the Telnic website, the service uses the Yahoo! YUI Connection Manager to allow data transfer between the service and your web page over Flash. Hosted on your own servers means you can use AJAX, making it work in devices like the iPhone and Android. The PHP requirements are Apache with mod_php (PHP 5), and Net/DNS.
If you’re interested in developing more tools for .tel, check out our developer resources at http://dev.telnic.org. Of course, it’s not just limited to the web – there are opportunities for mobile devices, voip and DECT phones also.
