

Hornet for Blackberry, real-time address book (Will .tel kill the phone number?) - plaggypig
http://www.hornethub.com/how-hornet-works/

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plaggypig
.tel is about using existing infrastructure (the DNS) to resolve contact
information. Will it make phone numbers as inconsequential to the experience
of communication as IP address are to browsing the web? Discuss.

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jrockway
It sounds like it's just someone trying to make money off a domain they're
stuck with. Why can't I use my regular domain name to store my contact
information? (And why would I want anyone that knows my domain name to be able
to call me? I treat phone numbers like _passwords_. If you don't know the
password, you can't call me. This system treats them like usernames. Not the
same.)

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sp332
I guess you could use something like Google Voice to blacklist (or whitelist)
phone numbers.

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jrockway
I do, but blacklisting is annoying (requires effort), and whitelisting can
easily cause me to miss important calls. The current system works pretty well.

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pistoriusp
I don't see why this needs to be a .tel specific technology.

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plaggypig
You're right, it doesn't, but see my other comment.

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fatdog789
No. Phone numbers are unique. Names are decidedly not unique. Every look in a
phone book for John Smith?

A .tel domain may be great for the first person to get a popular .tel name,
but it sucks for everyone else. And for that reason alone, it has no chance of
replacing a telephone book.

Also, it is an expensive, proprietary, unscalable solution to a problem that
doesn't exist.

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plaggypig
With a little bit of creativity you can do a lot with language, e.g. there are
hundreds of millions of names in each of the biggest namespaces
(AOL/Gmail/Skype/etc).

One shouldn't assume that the John Smith you know has JohnSmith.tel, but to
use a specialised search engine to find the correct one. You may already know
one piece of his contact information, his location, or some keywords that
might define him.

It's hardly expensive ($10 /year). Everything is open source and compliant
with preexisting standards. You can run your own TelHosting provider if you
want to. It's decentralised (obviously). Why would you say it's not scalable?
DNS is the most distributed and well balanced network that we have.

Finally, you OWN your data. There is no malevolent third party.

