Why dottel?: Reach me, the exact me you were looking for!

If I had a nickel for every time I've missed an opportunity to get to know a good looking woman on a train because my email is hard to spell or my phone number is too long and random to remember, like the situation in this video, I'd be only slightly richer at this point in my life. In all seriousness though, there is real value in controlling your online identity and providing one easy to remember/shortened mechanism for people to interact with the data that you want them to interact with online. This is the entire premise behind the .tel top-level-domain (TLD) available to everyone via Telnic. A little background as to why this is significant for me. You see the unfortunate thing is this; I have a doppelgänger that lives in South Dakota. I'm quite positive he's not my evil twin however when it comes to sorting out our identities on the Internet things get a little confusing. The "other" Brent Kastner looks similar, likes technology, is a photographer, and loves to waterski. All similar activities that one could mistake for my activities. He also owns brentkastner.com; how that happened I'll never know. This is precisely what I like about .tel. With .tel I can assemble all of the stuff that is "mine" into one page about me along with my picture, bio, interests, and contact info. This in turn will get picked up and indexed by search engines; hopefully above his. Check and Mate other Brent Kastner; we meet again!

Some details about my experience with it:

In the span of about an hour yesterday I set up http://brentk.tel for my personal contact information and ramblings and http://brentkastner.tel for my professional contact information and business affiliations. I registered my domains with name.com and used the .tel profile management tool to add relevant information about me into each domain. Just like creating a regular domain on the Internet I did still need to wait about 24 hours before the DNS changes propagated to DNS servers in my area, but as of this morning it's all up and running fine.

The above is cool, no question about it. What really blew my hair back about this though was the seamless integration of my brentk.tel domain with google apps! In about another 30 minutes I have mail, chat, voice, docs, and calendaring (to name a few apps) for me and up to 50 people that want a @brentk.tel address... For FREE! For me, this takes the capabilities of the .tel concept to the next level of cool. Now I can confidently use a google voice phone number (that isn't my actual cell phone number) as my "global" contact me phone number. I can screen calls, emails, chats, etc all through my .tel email account hosted on google without fear of exposing myself to unwanted spam, cold calls, etc.

Now, the next time I'm on a train I can confidently give brentk.tel for my contact info. She'll be totally impressed! I think I'll order some business cards, plain white, with just brentk.tel on it. Think of this for a moment. Introductions can now be part intro, part research project :).

My wishlist for additional capabilities:

1.) I think it would be great to have a twitter widget that links with my account on my .tel page subject to the same privacy profiling that .tel does so well now. I'd like to show in real-time whats happening in my world as I update it.
2.) It would be awesome if friending features could be integrated with friending in say LinkedIn, Facebook, Ning networks, etc? I'd really appreciate an integrated friends management approach vs. having to maintain a new separate list of friends.
3.) I'd like people without .tel accounts to request to see my information. See point 2, even telfriends is a bit weak in this regard.
4.) I'd like to be able to hang a blog off of blog.brentk.tel, create html content, or do other basic website related stuff here. Envision a day when I don't need any personal site at all, just the stuff contained here.
5.) I'd like to be able to "share" articles, websites, documents, anything available on the web via ShareThis, AddThis, or other sharing platforms directly to my .tel page

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~Brent Kastner

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Business cards with Dot Tel name:



Latest business cards with dot tel name arrived from http://goodprint.co.uk. Nice quality and service, as usual.

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How to spice up your Dot Tel domain:

Here are the available templates, from which you can select:
















How to set colours for the header and background for Dot Tel domains, using the .tel control panel:

When you are at your controll panel, respectively, dashboard, you go top left and click on the card "Design", and go from there. It is self explaining...

Which brings you up this controll panel:








Select a colour space number (1, 2 or 3):

The colour customising mini panel, that will pop up, looks like this:





In the vertical colour bar, you select a basic colour, for aditional fine tuning:

Then (within the left window) you place the cross on the ring, and move the ring to the right area, that brings up the colour you wish to have. Your selected colour then shows in one of the two small windows, top right within the small controll panel. --> Save your colour choice, with the "save" button, bottom, right side.




To add a logo, you must go back to the main control panel.







However, there are two tutorials. One in french, and another one in German (which will be continued):



1.) http://www.toutpointtel.fr/index.php...mode-d-emploi/



2.)

http://www.tel-blog.de/domaingestalt...reigeschaltet/

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And this is what is possible to create, within the limits...:

An Example of a Beautifully Designed Dot Tel Domain

We are all aware of the major design shortcomings of Dot Tel Domains. I, for example, will not use anything but the single colour Retro template. However, this Dot Tel Domain organictea.tel, is an excellent example of what can be achieved. It's the best one I have seen yet. Click on the image to see it full size. I like the attention to detail, the rouge on the girls face is the same colour as part of the template. 10/10!

Pay.tel an Andy: Shill bidding?

Pay.tel is currently owned by Andy Chantrill of the United Kingdom, who also owns Andy.tel. I reached out to Andy with a few questions to get some history on the Pay.tel domain and the current auction and here is that Q&A:

Q. Did you purchase the domain name Pay.tel during the landrush?
A. No, it was a failed Sunrise application that I caught during the General Availability phase.

Q. If so, do you mind sharing your purchase price?
A. $11.20

Q. How many .tel domain names do you own?
A. Over 50

Q. Have you sold any other .tel domain names?
A. Nope, I’ve bought a few though. I’ve received a lot of inquiries and some reasonable offers, but I’ve always rejected them. I have enough .tel domains to keep me busy for a long time, so I’m happy to let one or two go now. By the way I’m also auctioning Hosting.tel at Flippa.com: http://flippa.com/auctions/103324/Hosting-tel

Q. Did you receive the $5,000 USD bid directly on Sedo, via email or another form?
A. Sedo, but I ran a poll to solicit interest first: http://www.telnic.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1399

Thank you to Andy for answering these questions and I’m sure you may have been surprised to find out that Pay.tel was purchased as an available domain name for $11.20 as I was. Public availability became available for .tel domain names on March 24, 2009. Pay.tel was registered March 25, 2009.