10 years ago, most people only had one mailing address, one home phone number and one work phone. Not only did the general population only have a manageable number of ways to reach them directly, but also they kept the same contact information for years. Your parents worked at the same job and lived at the same address for 25 years. However with the proliferation of new technologies like pagers, cell phones, text messaging, email, instant messaging, blogs, personal websites and VOIP, the world of communication has dramatically changed.
We change our email addresses every couple of months. We also have at the minimum three email addresses: one for work, one for SPAM and one personal. We also carry the same ideal for the multitude of Instant Messaging (IM) login names we carry.
The average American has an average of two phone numbers per person. There are some many phone numbers; area codes have to be continually expanded to compensate for the growth.
Americans are also changing their jobs frequently as well. Along with the new jobs comes moving to another city. This ultimately means getting new work, home and mobile phone numbers.
So how do you keep track of all of your personal network’s changing contact information? You could rely on the old-fashioned way of keeping up to date by updating your palm pilot or address book periodically. However, Telnic, a tech company out of London, suggested creating a domain name extension called .TEL. As an individual, you would purchase a custom .TEL domain that would list all your current contact information. As part of the service, your information would constantly be updated so now the only thing your friends have to remember is your .TEL address.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers plans on reviewing this possibly next month. Do you really think this .TEL domain extension could really make a difference?
Special mention to Todd Bertsch on the heads-up on this entry
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