Status-Q

Here’s a quick idea: When you’re next getting your business cards printed, upload your vCard (the standard electronic equivalent) to a web server somewhere, and print the URL of the vCard on your business card. Most people end up copying business cards into an electronic address book – those that are important to them, anyway – and if you do this then they’ll only have to type in one thing.

You don’t have to publish your details for all and sundry to see; you don’t need to link to it from elsewhere on your web site, and you can pick a fun URL that people won’t guess, like www.mycompany.com/007.vcf . But if you’re giving somebody the details in paper form anyway, it’s probably because you want to make it easy for them to contact you, so why not make it even easier?

Creating a vCard file is easy. On a Mac, you can just drag your address from the Address Book to your desktop or some other folder. On Windows, I think you can select a contact in Outlook or Outlook Express and do a Save As… Thunderbird, sadly, doesn’t seem to export vCards yet, though it will import them.

There was a time when almost everyone had a PalmPilot, and you could just beam your details to them. Sometimes technology takes a step backwards…