Identity, contact info, business cards, online vs offline ppl

[shadowspar]

Noticed a conversation on twitter right now where two acquaintances of mine were talking about exchanging business cards at conferences, both of the dead-tree and vcf varieties. It came as rather a surprise to me that people at tech conferences are still exchanging business cards. Who really does that any more?

When I meet someone interesting in the tech scene for the first time, we essentially exchange URLs, because the vast majority of us seem to have some flavour of website/blog/profile/activity stream that links to most of the other personal information we care to publish. People I'm meeting in a "strictly professional" context get my twitter account. From there they can find my "professional" blog, which directly or indirectly links to GitHub, my résumé, a general idea of where I live (city & country) and my mobile #. Folks I'm more comfortable with probably get a link to this DW account, from whence they can also find flickr, last.fm, and so forth. Details like home phone number and exact physical address get given out on an as-needed basis.

How exactly does this tie in with how we see our own identity? I can't help but wonder if there's some kind of online-persona/offline-persona spectrum going on here, and what kind of identifiers we give people has to do with where we feel we mainly reside. There's a tie-in with wallet names and online handles here too. I think "shadowspar" is a rather puerile and somewhat meaningless handle, but back when I picked it (1999-2000-ish) it was essentially unique. If I tell someone that my nick is "shadowspar", and they feed that into a search engine, pages referencing me are largely what come out.

Dunno where I'm going with all this, it's just...business cards (at least the "traditional" variety, for some value of "traditional") seem to be a link to an offline identity, and just...that's not the world I live in any more.

Comments

[valancy]

I love business cards. I think of them like calling cards of old. When I meet someone I want to exchange info with, chances are we aren't using the same kind of smart phone so I can try to MMS my info or something but it isn't necessarily going to work. I don't use Outlook or have a Windows OS on mine. If other iPhone users have a particular app I can trade info with them, but all that's so complex. So I went to ooprint.com and got 250 free business cards and put my info on there. Plus, I have one set of cards for personal and one set for professional, since I have separate Twitter accounts and email accounts and so forth. I like the compartmentalization they give me.

[azurelunatic]

Yes; I'll also be getting separate cards for various applications.

[shadowspar]

Good point; the whole compartmentalization-even-in-the-physical-world wasn't something that had even dawned on me ^_^;
I completely grok your calling card analogy; I'm a stationery fiend myself.

[azurelunatic]

I can just give someone my Twitter, because I live there and because it links back to here, but if I say it to someone at an event, they're going to be juggling it with whatever other informational baggage. So when I get around to it, I'll be getting cards with my internet information as appropriate. Right now I have handwritten cards, or scribbling on a sheet from my little notebook.

[shadowspar]

True that, I hadn't considered the information chaos angle. =)

[floatboth]

QR codes on business cards = win. Smart hipster people could use their smartphone to add the info to their address book automatically, old-school folks would do it by hand.

I'm going to build a web app for making this easy… the thing is, iOS <= 4 accepts VCard only by email (haven't tested on 5 beta yet) and it'd be cool to use the hcard microformat along with vcf uploading.

[shadowspar]

Heh, yeah, business cards enter the information age. Not having a smartphone, I don't usually twig to the opportunities for QR. ^_^

[terriko]

MOO has made me love personal business cards: they're often tiny little art prints, so it's like a teensy gift rather than just a data exchange. Mine have my own photos on them, so they're often conversation starters as other people nearby see the card exchange and want in on that. ;)

My personal business card is pretty much tailored to conferences: it contains my name, url & email if you want to know more or contact me later, twitter if you want to follow me right now for more conference thoughts, and cell # so you can text me if you want to meet up for dinner later. I find it a lot easier to hand out or receive a business card on a noisy conference floor than it is to spell out names and hear numbers correctly.

Next step may be a QR code to save people the data entry if I go with slightly larger cards. Or I could just get one of these: http://blendcreations.com/weblog/2011/08/02/giveaway-august-2011/ and skip the business cards, but then I'd miss out on the "gifting someone with a tiny piece of art" experience that's been so common with the photos on my moo cards, and honestly I like the excuse to have prints of my stuff!

[shadowspar]

OMG yes! I've wanted to get a set of MOOcards for a long time, but had written it off as something fanciful to spend money on. I don't have a ton of favourite shots, but still, it's like a little bit of I-did-this-I'm-so-proud-and-here-I'm-giving-it-to-you in each card. =)