artificial ignorance

[Update 2/21/2010: TwtMyCard has been deadpooled :( Both Kevin and I love the concept and the promise of what TwtMyCard can deliver, but the cost of hosting the app deters our from keeping the project alive. We still love you.]

At SXSW this year, I noticed a few trends –

• everyone was exchanging business cards with everyone else,
• by hour 2 of being at the event on any given day, people would run out of business cards,
• by the end of each day, I’d have my pockets full of other people’s business cards, and,
• almost everyone I met was on twitter.

I make a conscious effort to convert physical business cards to contacts on Outlook. I really really do. But when you have over 150 business cards that you’ve collected over a week, you are limited in terms of what you can do with those cards.

The problem

(I’m going to try to use the “Dave McClure technique” of explaining the problem and the solution. Granted, I don’t have any numbers to back up my claims at this time.)

Business cards.

1. It’s cumbersome to carry around 100s of business cards.
2. The cards you receive some times never make it in electronic fashion to your computer.
3. You’re wasting paper by using business cards.
4. Some times when you meet that really important person, you almost instantly want to acknowledge the fact that you met them. I’ve noticed this as a trend as well – every now and then at a conference someone would ask me what my twitter handle was, and would want to send me a message right then and there. I’ve done this myself, here’s a personal example:

   

5. Some existing business card solutions almost force you to exchange this information in an electronic fashion instantaneously. That doesn’t really translate to how business cards work in the real world today. When you exchange physical business cards with someone, you are not obligated to electronically exchange this information as well. You’re expected to go back home and maybe transfer this on to your computer. Some solutions require you to hand out your phone number – that’s way too personal. Twitter handles are not that personal. I was really impressed that Shoeboxed slipped me an envelope under my hotel room door at SXSW this year, and prompted me to send them my business cards (which they should’ve parsed and converted to electronic format). It’s been over 6 months and I still haven’t heard back from them about the business cards that I’d mailed to them.
6. In some instances you don’t know how you met this person. Some people are prudent enough to carry around a pen, and usually make a note behind a business card.

The solution

Announcing TwtMycard – exchange business cards over Twitter. 

Here’s how it works :

1. Sign on to http://twtmycard.com using your Twitter credentials (we use OAuth).
2. Submit your profile information or upload a vCard, which we will parse for you.
3. You can set your profile to be public or private. If your profile is set to be private, your profile can only be seen by people you have explicitly sent your card to.
4. Follow @twtmycard (the ‘bot’ will automatically follow you back).
5. When you meet someone who you want to share your profile information with
   1. ask them for their twitter handle,
   2. send a direct message to @twtmycard with their handle.

      For example. I’ve just @ksmarshall, and I want to share my card with him.

      

   3. TwtMyCard will then send that person (ksmarshall in this example) a message with your profile information. The bot will act as a proxy, and send a tweet, @ message, to the recipient. That way this tweet doesn’t show up on YOUR twitter stream.

      
      (note that tweet was sent by @twtmycard, not by me)
      

   4. That’s it! Since my profile is public, visit http://twtmycard.com/anandiyer and you will see this :

      

What’s under the hood?

First off, my friend Kevin Marshall (@ksmarshall) deserves a HUGE pat on the back for this. I first had this idea first at SxSW and had created an ugly-as-sin prototype several months later. I’d coded it using WebForms in ASP.NET and C# and hosted it on Windows Azure. I shared the idea with Kevin, who basically threw away all my code and rewrote the ENTIRE thing in ASP.NET MVC and of course made it look ridiculously pretty.

There’s a front-end Windows Azure web role that you get to see, and a background worker role (we call it the ‘bot’) that wakes up every few minutes, reads all the direct messages (since the last time it read DMs), parses the message, and sends @ messages to the recipient with a link to the sender’s profile.

All the profile data is hosted on Azure Table Storage.

Future

TwtMyCard is VERY much a beta an alpha project. There’s still a decent amount of work to be done.

1. Add Microsoft Tag Support.
2. Cancel your account.
3. Add EULA and information about user privacy.
4. Add context to your tweet (so that you can recollect how you met this person)
5. Support changes in Twitter uids

Have ideas for us? Add it on our uservoice page.

What does this mean for Kevin and I?

Neither of us are quitting are day jobs. Period. This is purely a passion project. We’ll continue to work on it on the side. Maybe :)

In all seriousness, this project has NOTHING to do with my employer, Microsoft Corp., or Kevin’s employer, Clarity Consulting. These companies should not be held liable for anything related to TwtMyCard. Please dont hold us liable for any data you store on TwtMyCard. While we promise to not use your information maliciously, we cannot be held liable if something goes wrong – this is very much an alpha product.

Start using it now!

http://www.twtmycard.com

-Kevin and “ai”

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