Whither the business card?

I'm thinking about the last few contacts I made face to face in this business, and it dawns on me that most of them have been made electronically. I hate business cards, because I never have time to enter all the details from the cards that I collect on trips. This means that the information on the cards sits in drawers and gets lost. It is never there when I need it. Neither is the information on the card 'alive', because it doesn't represent a link to someone's online information. Instead, it is static, and dry.  

I generally find contacting someone via a social network far more productive than simply exchanging business card information, because not only do you get a means of contacting them online, but you also get other useful information about them that is regularly updated. Adding someone on LinkedIn, for example, will give you useful information about who they have worked with, and what they've done. When dealing with potential employers or employees, this is invaluable.

Even when I meet people face to face, I now find myself linking with them electronically by 'bumping' them. Bump is an application available for the iPhone and the Android operating system that lets you exchange contact data by simply shaking your phone near someone else's. All of your contact information drops into their address book, and vice versa. It even lets you connect to your fellow Bumper on social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Unfortunately, BlackBerry users, along with owners of other phones other than the iPhone or the Android, can't use Bump. But even in this scenario, or in a situation where someone has a supported device but doesn't use Bump, I find that we connect with each other later on by searching each other out on a social network.

Even if someone hands me a business card these days, I will generally throw it away within a couple of minutes. Why? Because I use a business card scanner built into my phone to register all of their information and drop it straight into my contact database. I was using Shape Services' Business Card Reader for the iPhone, which takes a photograph of a card and uses a mixture of optical character recognition and clever software guesswork to decode the visual information in a card. However, CardMunch is now offering a similar application with a difference - you pay for each card, and the image is farmed out using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to human workers who verify that the information on the card has been correctly interpreted.

I've also found myself replacing the traditional CV with an electronic one. I find that using LinkedIn's profile page to its full extent can provide more information than a conventional CV ever could. When applying for gigs nowadays, I send people my LinkedIn profile URL, which lists my full working history, while also displaying other people's testimonials about me. It's like having tens of references built into your CV. 

Of course, people will still probably want to carry cards around in case of emergency - but I'd hope that at this point, people would be willing to do something really creative with them, and use them as high-end calling cards for particularly valued contacts, rather than merely as the inefficient mechanisms for information exchange that they have become. Back in 2001, design firm IDEO presented a project that it hoped would reinvent the business card. The company has taken the link down since, which is sad, because even now, the ideas presented there are still highly imaginative. Here's the Wayback Machine link to a cached version of the original site.