For sometime off and on, I’ve had the thought of getting a new set of business cards. The trouble I am getting into is with the mental reconciliation of what a traditional business card should contain with what a new age business card should look like. This is particularly true for someone who is a blogger and has a online profile.
A neat business card would look like this, from an XRI/i-name perspective.
or
But that goes against the concept of a business card, doesn’t it ? You give someone your business card because you might be interested in, er, doing business with them, or in the least, keep in contact. Would it make sense then to make that person go through additional steps to figure out how to contact you ?
Should emerging technologies like XRI and OpenID be used to manage and present your online identity to other humans or should they be used strictly to talk to other services ?
A traditional business card will contain all of one’s contact information: Full Name, Phone, Email, WebSite and optionally a title, and a company name. All of these attributes are transient in nature. A person can change his/her name, phone number, email etc. From this perspective, you’d want a business card that is living – one that you can distribute it one time and after that, be assured that it will always refer the card holder to your most up-to-date information.
The problem of spamming using the information from your traditional business cards can also be solved if an XRI/OpenID-style business card is used. If someone wants to get in touch with you, these emerging protocols come to your rescue and ensure that there is a human being that is contacting you — and not a bot.
The problem with XRI and OpenID-style cards is that one makes a rather big assumption that everyone has internet access. Not only that, in order to use your business card, one must be online. How big of a problem is this ? I am not sure but would venture to guess that it is not.
