After researching and discussing this idea with experts involved in the future of the Internet and technologies like ENUM at Nominet and other organisations I have yet to find anyone suggesting what I am suggesting here. The idea has been bouncing around my head for months so I had to put it down on (virtual) paper for my own peace of mind.
What’s the idea?
The idea is that the domain name becomes the central point for everything. All contact methods. All devices use the domain name to connect to a company using any method. For example:
Call a domain name on your telephone
Send an SMS to a domain
Instant Message a domain name from your IM client
Type the domain name into your Satellite Navigation system for GPS co-ords
Visit a domain name on your video enabled device for a video ad or live feed
Email a domain name (without a user@ - only once we’ve conquered spam!)
Visit the website through an Internet Browser (as we all know and love)It’s expandable to almost any recognised method of contact and many methods we may not have invented yet.
I think we’ve been slowly making our way towards this without any real plan for a while - 15 years ago we never saw a domain advertised on TV, now sometimes it’s all we see.
Companies are being set up with the company name as the domain name, e.g. moneysupermarket.com Ltd. Companies are registering their domain names as trademarks. Some might not have realised it but already the domain is becoming ‘all important’ and in the future I see it being the only piece of information a customer would ever need.
The days of a company needing to detail dozens of contact methods for many different departments and locations are common but would no longer be needed. If your customer knows the domain name, they already know this information. It’s returned by the DNS and your NOM enabled device auto-selects or requires your input to tell it which department or office to call.
From a commercial standpoint, being able to only advertise the domain name and enable your potential customers to contact you in any way with that piece of information has huge potential. It centralises it all.
It obviously has real usability benefits too. Ask yourself the following questions:
How many company telephone numbers can you remember?
How many company domain names can you remember?
I think it would be fair to say that most trading around the world (maybe 95% + of all money spent) is happening with companies that have a registered domain name. If customers could connect to a company by telephone, fax, IM, email or web by only needing to remember the domain name this would surely help commerce and improve user experience.
NOM enabled devices would be able to show a user how best to contact the company and possibly in preference order. The company could update this information at the press of a button and is in total control of the information because it’s stored in their domain name’s DNS record. This technology is already available through the standards used by ENUM. For more on ENUM visit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_Number_Mapping
My Background
Before I get into the technical side of what I'm proposing let me say this - I have a reasonable technical grasp of the structure of the Internet but I am by no means an expert.
My company has its own name servers and I have a basic grasp of technologies like ENUM. I run an advertising agency, own thousands of domain names and host websites and email services for a small number of clients. Perhaps this combination of interests makes what I'm suggesting so much clearer to me than it does to others but allow me to explain.
NOM
NOM stands for Name Operation Mapping and is the name I have dreamt up for the method of using any device to connect to a company through any operation (call, email, SMS etc) using only the domain name.
The method uses a DNS NAPTR lookup to determine how best to connect a user with a company based on the domain name and type of operation, e.g. call, SMS, video, IM, email, GPS etc.
The technique requires a collection of NAPTR records stored in DNS and uses the same standards to those already being used by ENUM.
In my opinion ENUM is a huge leap forward but there’s something missing.
One central record for all contact information
I think ENUM is a crucial part of Internet Telephony and is the step required to get all telephone users using VOIP. It's crucial for what I'm proposing to be possible. I also think that for many personal users ENUM will be the end of the road and all they need. However, for commercial use there's so much more potential.
For me, one of the most interesting parts of ENUM is the way of centralising all of your contact information, contact methods and contact preferences in one place but I think there's a big part missing.
ENUM lets you list email addresses, multiple telephone numbers, GPS co-ordinates, websites, fax numbers and information detailing when you're available. This information is retrieved by querying the DNS for a phone number. And that's what's wrong.
Remembering a sequence of 11 digits
To have all of this information available centrally is awesome and necessary for the future but to find this information you need to use one detail - a phone number, a collection of numbers that as we all know are notoriously hard to remember.
A typical user of a mobile phone would have the numbers of their friends, family and colleagues in their phone's address book or contact list but how many companies would be stored there? For 95% of the population maybe their work number or the work number of a few friends. Certainly not a company they've dealt with once or never before.
Those same people are likely to remember the domain of a company they’ve used previously. They’re also likely to remember a domain that just flew past them on the side of the bus, was flashed in front of them on TV or one they’ve been hearing on the radio for weeks.
Directory Enquiry Services
Collectively we spend millions using directory enquiry services and we're already seeing a shift with people using their mobile device to find the number on the company website or find the company first on Google rather than using a directory enquiry service. If they could call the domain name, it makes it so much simpler.
The DNS is ready for it
The same methods used for ENUM work for this too, DNS NAPTR records are flexible enough and structured for exactly what's needed.
Web Hosts aren't ready and neither are the devices
I realise that many web hosts are not setup to allow NAPTR records listed on a domain currently but a third party service could bridge that gap. The devices aren't ready either. A standard SatNav isn't programmed to query the DNS, neither is a phone or most other potential uses.
I'll be honest - I don't regularly share ideas
Normally, if I'm working on an idea with (I believe) huge potential the last thing I'm going to do is post it on the Internet and encourage people to circulate it but it's clear that the idea needs to be shared and developed further.
Commercial potential
Any business owner or CEO could see the benefits of only needing to publicise one piece of information for their customers to contact them using any method. All of a sudden the domain names you see advertised on hoardings at football games and on sports stars become telephone numbers, email addresses or pin point instructions for your SatNav.
It might even encourage users to join the ENUM revolution
At the moment ENUM only offers cost saving benefits if the people you’re calling have one too. It’s like being the first man with a fax machine – it’s not much use until everyone’s got one (see post below: ENUM – the future). If an ENUM enabled phone was able to connect to a company through NOM it would offer real benefits to a user and would be seen as a real leap forward.
Further development
A further development could be that a different result is returned based on your physical location. When making the request the NOM enabled device could pass your GPS co-ordinates to retrieve the best telephone number for your country or city or retrieve the GPS co-ordinates of the store closest to you. However, this is most probably beyond the current structure of a NAPTR record.
A better solution might be for the DNS to return all options and your NOM enabled device interpret the results based on your current location. Again, returning this amount of data would be much more than the DNS is currently built to support.
Turn it on now!
I'm not saying let's do it tomorrow - I realise that if something like this was made possible it would take years to be in place properly but the more I think about it and the more people I talk to about it the more essential it seems.
I know there are technical issues that make it difficult. For example:
- All devices rely entirely on a web connection.
- Increased security issues regarding domain hi-jacking and failing to renew a domain name.
- You can't type a dot on a typical telephone handset!
- If it was possible to reach a company by email using only the domain it's a spammers dream come true.
Please share this with anyone you think might be interested. I would love to hear anyone's thoughts and developments on this idea. I'm aware that there would be some technical issues with implementing something like this but I doubt any issues would outweigh the obvious benefits of what's proposed.
I'm interested in any similar ideas or developments anywhere else and very interested if you've spotted a major problem that I've overlooked.
Thanks for reading,
Elliott.
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