it would be great if most people put a little code on their paper business card.
you could give the card to someone you want to make contact with. if they saw the code they could, instead of typing in your contact information into their PIN (or using a card-scan reader), they could just type in the code and it would automatically download your most current information.
of course, ideally this would also work on a mobile phone.
i can’t imagine why plaxo (or even linkedin, skype, or numerous sites that collect your information) couldn’t do this today. if just a small portion of people adopted it, it would be a lifesaver for people that collect a lot of business cards (and very helpful to even the average person that collects a few). and it would be a great way of further advertising the service. i know i’d put it on my business card immediately…
sounds like Gregory Narain’s: SparkCard.
Peter,
You bet it does. The biggest challenge with this thing, and I can say this because I have been trying, is getting people to use it.
The SparkCard gives you a SparkID which can be used for all sorts of things like you mention.
Greg
actually, that’s an idea also mentioned in Snowcrash, one of my all-time favorite SF books.
only problem was, you don’t want business cards to get (or give) you a computer virus.
better practice “safe meishi” out there folks 😉
OK, but then spammers and other bad people just write a ‘bot that connects to the API and gets all this info for users w/ PIN nums 0000 through 9999– not good. I imagine the implementation piece not expressed here is that you’d need to have a PIN, AND some other secondary key (making it a bit less convenient but more secure).
As an add-on for {linkedin, f’ster, Tribe, skype, etc etc} sounds very useful to have this universal identifier code, so you can add once, add everywhere for a person. Then again, some folks don’t want to be known as the same identity across biz, social, and dating sites, etc!
-Ken (running off now to add my new universal web id to the RFID tag embedded in my forehead)
take a look at semacode (www.semacode.org).
(argh, you don’t allow links!)