I’ve seen a few people talking recently about the new .tel domain extension. Essentially, its purpose is to combines profile information into one central location that can be associated with your company, in one place. More info over here. With a .tel, you cannot control the look and feel of the website, and everyone’s looks the same. For me, it’s not something that I’d look twice at. Worse still, is that they have failed to adequately encode the email address on the website, leaving you wide open to email spam. See a few samples over here.
What are your options?
So if you are planning on putting all of your social profiles in one place what are your options?
If you’ve went down the personal branding route, then putting your social profiles on your own website makes sense. I’ve added a few of my own social buttons to the mug shot in the footer, which allows the visitors to my site to connect with me in various locations online. If you have however more than one person working with you, or have a company then putting your various social profiles on your corporate website probably wont work. From a maintainance viewpoint, it would be a bit of a nightmare as people move on, and join new services
1) Retaggr
URL: www.retaggr.com
This service has a couple of benefits, firstly it provides you with both a webpage (albeit hosted and owned by retaggr) that you can aggregate all of your social activity on, in much the same way as something like friendfeed works. It also has the added benefit of providing a widget control (via either javascript or iframe) that you can embed on both your website and more importantly a link you can put inside your email. This is one of the more overlooked areas with email signatures.
Many people are happy to provide methods on how to contact people (email address telephone number) – but only a few provide the ways in which you can connect with them online. The two are independant from each other. Retaggr’s tag card provides the mechanism to do so. They have listed a whole boat load of services that you can attach to your profile. Everything from Microblogging services like Twitter or Plurk , to Real Estate Web2.0 sites such as Active Rain or Trulia.
2) Chimp
URL: www.chi.mp
Chimp describes itself as a “Content Hub and Identity platform”, and offers your own .mp domain name. You can get creative, to bag yourself a nice domain name to host your page on. Here’s a few words ending in .mp that you could potentially use, assuming they have already been registered. The service is only open since the start of the month, so you should be able to snag something quite catch.
With Chimp, one of its primary selling points for me anyway, was that you can separate private from public profiles, so that certain people within your sphere of contact can see different things. The address book import facility within chimp allows you to bring all of your contacts in from Hotmail , Gmail, Flickr or Twitter and assign them access rights accordingly within the system. Private parts of your profile then use open ID to authenticate, which is pretty clever.
Theming of your profile can be controlled easily by either selecting a default theme (of which there are about 15 available) or by designing your own, choosing your background colour, and image.
3) Tabber
URL: www.tabber.org
Whereas some of theother aforementioned services publish your service data publically, tabber simply aggregates it in one place, hidden from view. At time of writing it supported a number of social websites including delicious, facebook, digg, flickr, google reader, last fm or any RSS feed you choose.
With the recent explosion of lifestreaming, I’m not sure if a private approach offers advantages. I already know what I’m doing around the web, so aggregating that as a stream for me doesn’t make much sense. But then, that’s just me, you guys can make up your own minds. One useful part of the service however is that you can see what your friends are doing, all in one place. Clever, as it saves you from checking their delicious stream or their recent diggs.
4) ProfileoMat
URL: www.profileomat.com
ProfileoMat takes a similar approach to managing your social profile as retaggr, however isn’t quite as polished from a user interface perspective. It is the personal project of Christian Schneider, featured on the front page of the site. It does have a social aspect to the site, allowing you to add friends already inside the network, but chances are unless most of your friends are early adopters, you’ll have to convince them to join. A bit of a chicken and egg scenario.
ProfileoMat has got geotagging features which allows you to pinpoint your location at any given time as well. All in all it is a relatively well rounded site, but doesn’t yet have the adoption that some of the larger players have. Widget support is via javascript, whereas retaggr has a number of embeddable options.
5) ProfileFly
URL: www.profilefly.com
ProfileFly, out of all the services reviewed in this post, has the most options for the syndication of your profile. They have a banner, a (flash based) widget an RSS feed and now a new Facebook application. The rss feed is of particular interest because it would allow you to develop third party integration with all of your social profiles at a little to no cost to the developer. Signup was a relatively painless profile, and I was up and running in literally 1-2 minutes. ProfileFly allows you to add both your contacts and your social profile data into it, which facilitates their Myspace like search for other likeminded individuals using the service. Well worth a look.
Other honourable mentions
URL: www.zoolit.com – Another shareable Web page that lists all your personal sites
URL: http://www.ibegin.com/labs/wp-lifestream/ – Allows you to Lifestream all of your activity online
URL: http://mylifeonline.com/ – Personal dashboard for the social web
URL: http://friendfeed.com/ – Lifestreaming you and your friends online.
linky
posted:April 4, 2009 4:41 pm
To start with .tel is not about websites. The “site” is just a simple way to display some of the information that you can store in a .tel domain.
In fact the .tel domain was only permitted by ICANN to be used for specific things which is why you can’t create “normal” DNS records, websites etc.,
If you have a look at some of the applications that have .tel support you should begin to realise that .tel is all about using DNS to store contact information.
Instead of you (or me) having to check that a number / email address or website address is correct / current you simply store the .tel domain for the person or organisation in your address book. The person or organisation edits / expands / deletes contact details as normal, but when your handheld device (or computer address book) does a look up it pulls down the most current set of data via dns.
With regard to the email addresses being exposed – two things:
1 – if you don’t want them exposed why are you sharing them with everyone?
2 -if you feel that telnic’s system should obfuscate the addresses on the Telnic hosting platform why not tell them? They’re open to input from the community.
3 – If you want to choose who gets access to your email addresses then you can protect them using the .tel system
If you go to my personal .tel (http://mneylon.tel) you won’t see my personal email address unless I have agreed to share it with you.
As for those various web services etc, that you can use …
With the chi.mp service you don’t actually own the domain name, so what’s to stop them from changing their terms of service at some point in the future?
Personally I prefer to have more control over things.
I have my .tel domain and I can choose which data I want to share and with whom. I’m not going to have to worry about a change in terms of service.
Michele
Michele
linky
posted:April 4, 2009 5:00 pm
Michele,
I have to admit I was oblivious to the fact that .tel was primarily about storing information, and the .TEL website being an “additional extra” if you like. In fact that makes it much clearer as to its purpose, if the information gained by third party devices is used legitimately. Essentially what you are saying is that .TEL domains are for computers and not people. Perhaps there is a need for this, and I have to hold my hands up and say I didn’t realise this. However could this gap not be better filled via Microformats?
My problem with adoption still stands in that there doesn’t seem to be any hardware applications using this information YET, and that therefore doesn’t make any difference to me personally.
In response to your comments regarding the email addresses being exposed.
1) I want to release my email to anyone who wants it (who is human), but not expose it to an automated machine. I have no problem with a randomer contacting me, but wish to minimise the impact from harvesters. Not everything is as black and white as that.
2) Telnic’s failing is of no concern to me personally. I’m not trying to sell the idea / concept. Essentially, those sort of flaws need to be voiced by people such as yourself. Especially if you are coming up against it from the very people you wish to adopt the service.
With regard to the services I’ve mentioned above. Yes you are correct in the assumption that the http://chimp addresses could change. That said however, I have stated that I think the best place for social profile information is on your website, integrated with Microformats if you so wish.
However there are a good number of people who use the web who don’t necessarily already have a website, and have no desire or need to own one. These services in my opinion fill that gap, and provide a means to further connect with a person using the services they use.
Paul.
Paul Anthony
linky
posted:April 4, 2009 5:05 pm
Considering the TLD only launched a couple of weeks ago it would be a small bit unreasonable to expect mobile phones etc, to support it “out of the box” already :)
You can, however, download software for iPhone, Windows Mobile and a few other devices / software on the Telnic community site
Michele
Michele
linky
posted:April 4, 2009 5:08 pm
Fair point ;o)
I’ll have to just sit back and wait this one out, I’m not generally known to be an early adopter, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Thanks for the feedback and clarification.
Paul.
Paul Anthony
linky
posted:April 4, 2009 6:21 pm
Just wanted to chime in to throw another option into the mix: DandyID (www.dandyid.org).
DandyID aggregates all your (public) social profiles into a single place (over 300 services supported) and then lets you share them via widgets (and WordPress and Blogger plugins).
The best part of DandyID, though, is that it is really a social data portability platform. We have an API that developers can use to build applications that leverage your identity graph and profile information. Devs can push and pull that info, meaning, for example, they could theoretically make a site that pull your profile from DandyID automatically so you don’t even have to fill it out when you sign up. Then any changes you make could be pushed back to every DandyID-enabled site. In other words: a single, globally recognizable profile (in that respect, DandyID is kind of like Gravatar but for your entire social identity). :)
We’d love for you to check it out and let us know what you think.
Josh Catone
DandyID Community Manager
Josh Catone
linky
posted:April 4, 2009 7:08 pm
Paul
A TLD will live or die based on usage and adoption.
Some TLDs are barely surviving, others are booming, while others are doing just fine serving their user community just the way they are.
I’m not sure how long it will take before we see widespread adoption of .tel, but they’ve got some incredibly smart people working for them, so I’d feel very confident in their chances of success
Michele
Michele