Developments in OAuth and OpenID

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’?

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?

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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The Digital Election?

April 6th, 2010

So the UK election date has finally been announced.  Commentators are saying that this will be the year that the internet will impact on the citizens of the United Kingdom and their choice of their new leaders.  Whilst television debates between party heads is something new to the UK, it is likely that the post-broadcast scrutiny will be conducted through social media channels, with the content quickly edited and re-framed to paint the participants in a different light for all to see.

It will be interesting to see whether Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs) will engage positively with their constituents online and whether the debates, policies and manifestos will be open and transparent.  How accessible will PPCs be prior and post election?  What long tail content will be exposed to heighten or damage the reputations of individuals intending to represent the views of the country in Parliament?  And how savvy will PPCs be when it comes to managing what i-Crossing VP Antony Mayfield calls their ‘web shadow’ – their online reputation as defined by what is found by searching for them?

Here at Telnic, we commissioned Kipper Williams to put together a fun cartoon to imagine what it would be like if all PPCs were to think about how their constituents can find and contact them easily, so that they can interact with them in their daily lives through the channels that they use.  There is still an incredible diversity of communications channels and technologies that are being employed by residents of the UK, matching the diversity of the country’s inhabitants.

With a .tel name, PPCs can be easily found, can communicate with their constituents using different languages, and quickly update them on the location of their next surgery or other meetings, as well as having a central place online under their control in order to manage their online reputation.  With time pressures and focus on communicating, as well as the diversity of PPCs skills in the online environment, a .tel name can be an incredibly useful and easy to manage resource to help them in their campaigning.

For PPCs that would like to find out more, please email Aled Williams.

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Saving customers time

March 23rd, 2010

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.

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Growing Your Own Business Event – Resources

March 22nd, 2010

Thanks to all of those that attended my talk at the Growing Your Own Business event in London on Saturday.  As promised for those of you that didn’t get a resources sheet, please find some useful links below.

http://www.loudmouthman.com/2008/10/26/you-should-fire-your-web-agency-when/ - things to ask a web design agency before you hire them

http://posterous.com – Free easy-to-use blogging platform that can be updated from email

http://ping.fm – Central distribution point to multiple social networks

http://getbusinessonline.co.uk – Free domain name, design and Google Local listings

http://twitter.com – free micro-blogging message network – 140 characters, globally!

http://www.slideshare.net/hasseily/seo-on-a-budget - SEO on a Budget

http://clapperton.tel – Author of ‘This is Social Media’

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/ - Excellent blog from online (and offline) marketing guru

http://gapingvoid.com – Building a global micro-brand

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voipGATE show off new .tel-powered apps at UCExpo

March 11th, 2010

Yesterday I managed to pop into the Unified Communications Expo to see one of our technology partners, voipGATE, who were exhibiting their soft and hard VoIP services.  I caught up with Jorge Marques, Chief Operations Officer, who showed me the latest versions (beta) of their softphone for Windows and now Mac, which integrate .tel into the core very nicely.  You can lookup, dial and manage .tel domains through these applications if you’ve bought them via voipGATE or EuroDNS (I’m sure they’ll be able to enable other customers using voipGATE to manage their own .tel domains through their integrated management console soon).

Additionally, they’ve got a great mobile app built at http://voipgate.mobi for smartphones and iPhones which provide low- and no-cost call back if you’ve got an account, again providing direct integration of .tel into the apps.

There’s more exciting work going on behind the scenes which I’m sure we’ll be blogging about in the near future.  Great work voipGATE!  The software can be downloaded here: http://voipgate.com/site/en/softphone/view-category.html

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AdSense and TelAds

March 11th, 2010

The integration of Google AdSense into .tel names is in final testing and will be released later this month.  Here’s an image of how AdSense and TelAds fit together.  We’re also increasing the size of the TelAds text to be in line with the size of the text for contact information stored in the main page.

Google AdSense, TelAds and Related Content Links

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More Awards for Telnic

March 11th, 2010

We were delighted to pick up yet another award this time at CeBIT in Hannover from the European Multimedia Forum (EMF).  The European Seal of e-Excellence Award has been given out since 2003 and awarded to companies that have been pioneering and marketing innovative products and services.  Fiona McKeown, our Chief Financial Officer, was present to receive the award.

More information can be found in our press release here.

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Update from MacWorld 2010

February 23rd, 2010

Henri and I travelled to MacWorld to launch the new My.tel 2.0 app for the iPhone in February.  Whilst Apple as an entity wasn’t at the show, there were plenty of representatives walking around and seeing what was on offer.  We were in the Mobile Applications Showcase that was, for most of the show, buzzing with a good flow of people and we were joined at some points by representatives from Name.com as well as Hank Grebe from One San Francisco (who posted here), a new community for the region intending to replicate the success that One Vancouver has shown in Canada.  We wish Hank well and if you’re in the area, please do contact him at http://hankgrebe.tel to find out more.

The show itself was pretty busy and we met with a vast range of people, from journalists right through to school kids.  Interestingly, within the Mobile Applications Forum, there were very few companies showing tools and technologies for productivity, but those that were – including us – were given strong attention.  The iPhone is increasingly being considered a tool for work and My.tel 2.0 as well as Superbook was well received.

There’s still a barrier we’ve recognized when talking to many people regarding their expectations and hang ups of what a domain name is and what it does, but we’re starting to see people actually focusing on what .tel does differently.  Even technology media are starting to listen and take notice of the phrase ‘but it doesn’t host websites’!  It’s this crucial bit that journalists have been missing in their continued high-pressure environment.  Indeed, Jake Widman from ComputerWorld wrote a great piece after our meeting and we had a great discussion with him regarding how innovative yet ‘utility-like’ technologies are being missed in the echo-chamber of technology columns that seem to be filled with Google, Facebook and Twitter and the challenges and announcements they make on a daily basis.  At the same time, we’ve been working hard to make the look and feel and experience of .tel useful to the end user who is not technical, hiding the complexity through applications like My.tel, enabling them to get the power of having a domain name with all of the discoverability that this entails, but also minimizing the effort it takes to get something up and running quickly that can be easily managed in a way they feel comfortable with.

Where I could, I asked people to comment on video about their thoughts about .tel – and yes, there were people there including Will Snow who already use .tel (Will is at http://willsnow.tel), and it’s always great to catch up with members of our community who are getting real benefit from it.  Additionally, talking to people in their various careers – from architects through to those working for higher education institutions – and really seeing their eyes light up at the ease of use and functionality within a very low price is a great experience.  What struck both Henri and myself was that many people are now increasingly looking at their personal brands online, whether they’re in a job or seeking new opportunities.  People were walking away and coming back 30 minutes later with their .tel names purchased, set up and resolving with a real sense of excitement.  Take a look at the video below for some of the comments we managed to capture.


YouTube link to MacWorld 2010 Visitors Comments about .tel

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