The Sunjay Times

Here’s a half-baked idea that I’ve been thinking about today. I’ve recently made some new friends from a dinner party organized by mutual friends (a pretty common thing most people can relate to, I hope) and I was asked for my vCard. That’s rather unusual – first time I’ve been asked for a vCard. Then I started thinking, how have I exchanged information with new people I’ve met? There’s no one clear easy way. Sometimes we exchange Twitter handles, Facebook accounts, email addresses, phone numbers, etc. by means of writing it down on a paper, verbally, exchanging a business card, or literally pulling out the phone in my pocket and immediately firing an email off to the other person so they’d have my email right away (or I email myself their information so that I can tweet at them later, etc.)

No, I don’t use silly phone apps – I know there’s a million of them. Why? While they are cool and feature rich (‘feature rich’ is not a compliment here), usually they require the other person to also have the app. While it’s great for the startup because they think it increases virality and helps with their user acquisition, I’m not going to try to convince someone to install an app the first time I’ve met the person just so we can exchange contact information. No.

But the vCard request digs at something deeper. When I think of someone’s complete and comprehensive contact information, I’m thinking of the person’s email, mobile phone, work phone, home phone, home address, work address, Twitter username, Facebook account, Skype username, LinkedIn, etc.

It’s still fundamentally a pain in the ass to exchange a collection of such information to someone new. Usually we just ask for one piece of information, and we proceed to create a new contact, and then fill in the other fields later, usually manually by hand.

Is there a better solution? Is there an opportunity for a solution?

Update 1: LOL – less than 10 minutes after I post this, someone in my social network tells me he has a startup that’s attacking this problem. I’ll be looking forward to hearing about this solution

Update 2: The day after, I stumble upon this story on WaPo: “Business cards thrive in a digital age“. Perhaps an indication that all electronic solutions to date still don’t have a value proposition that is powerful enough to “punch through” the status quo (to quote Marc Andressen)