[verisimilidude]

I recently gave serious thought to building something similar to a rolodex social network, but eventually poked too many holes in it to follow through.

I'd just come back from a conference at which I'd been asked for business cards by lots of people, maybe a hundred. Of all those people, I only really cared to hear back from a few. Though it's nice to have my name out there and be cordial in the industry, I wanted to place some kind of filter on all the vendor spam that inevitably followed. If...I could easily provide "redacted" or "enriched" contact info, maybe via QR on a smartphone screen, for instance, it would be possible to meter who gets which contact info without hurting any future networking opportunities.

If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.

[jabelk]

This is totally off the cuff, but here's my first thought:

To sign up for the site, you need only a username, password, and verification method (email/sms/facebook/something to authenticate you as a person, but this wouldn't necessarily be tied to the account). The usernames are unique, and your personal url is domain.com/username or something along those lines (like reddit).

Then you can give your business card to everyone and their spammy recruiter, and if they follow up and visit your domain.com/username, they can hit the "request email" button, at which point you can choose which email to give them or ignore it all together. Potential problem is that unique usernames will mean that professional ones run out quickly. Not sure at what scale that becomes an issue....

In other news, if anyone here is going to be at hackMIT and would be interested in working on something like this, email me (its in my profile).

[jlees]

Hmm, a kind of double opt-in? (Or possibly triple if you count handing out the card in the first place.)

Interesting idea, at the same time there are ways to replicate this today in terms of 'send me a blind message on Facebook/LinkedIn and I'll maybe reply' and it doesn't seem to work well, at least not in my experience. It's about the power dynamic, fundamentally.

[notahacker]

Doesn't the facility to redirect email from certain addresses straight to a spam box or to higher priority accounts make regular email filters more-or-less functionally equivalent?

I don't think I give my business card out to enough spammers for the need to manually opt-in everyone that wants to email me to be a less laborious task than blocking/ignoring the occasional promotional mailing.

[soneca]

I couldn't reply on your last comment, so it will be here. How would be your "9 or 10 cards"?

I imagine you can just control what info a conctact would have access. Maybe: professional email, personal email, office phone, personal phone, where do you work. Maybe one profile for each info..but that is 5... how to reach 9 or 10?

I think of a relationship regulated by tags. Tags similar to Google+ Circles. You can use to set context: <church>, <college>, <company>. Or access: <prospect>, <top investor>, <important network>, <conference contact>. You can define an access profile for a particular tag.

You can change contacts though an app, but he won't have any access until you alocate a tag to him. So you won't offend anyone upfront, as even the VIP investors will have to wait until you put an all-accesstag on them. So it is a much more subtle acknowledge when after weeks the contact still don't have access to your email.

[verisimilidude]

I could imagine setting up the following cards right away. And by "card", I'm not specifically referring to a piece of paper, but perhaps some kind of contact-info-related digital object.

* BFFs

* Recent acquaintances

* Close family (reasonable people)

* Extended family (think annoying newsletter emails)

* Co-workers (cell number included)

* Clients (cell number definitely not included)

* Spammy business contacts (vendors)

* Travel (something I could hand out with temp hotel and phone info, etc.)

* Japanese (my wife is from Japan, we have lots of friends here and visit there often)

I could also imagine handing out specific cards at various social functions. For example, at a writing club I used to attend, I'd want to provide a link to my portfolio online. I'd never ever want anyone else to read that embarrassing stuff though. In another case, I used to attend a board game club, and it would've been nice to hand out cards with links to my profile on boardgamegeek, meet-up profile, etc.

It seems like this would work best if the exchange format was simply vCard or some other open format. You get to control who gets what at the point of exchange, and they can consume it into whatever system they like. There's no after-the-fact futzing with tags or permissions or contact management; it's just a system to control how you present yourself. The whole idea is probably DOA if you can't interface with the rest of the world's contact software. Maybe you allow connections if both people in the exchange are users of your service, but you wouldn't want to take it for granted.

As an aside, this got really interesting when we considered the "hot girl in a bar" situation. Let's say she gets asked for contact details many times, it's too loud to hear names or whatever, so she might need to snap a picture of the guy at any point of exchange, then review and modify permissions later. But that seems kinda fussy as a system.

[walterbell]

See Boston Review (Mar 2014) editorial on pseudonyms, with responses by Frank Pasquale, Bruce Schneier, Richard Stallman, Evgeny Morozov & others, http://bostonreview.net/forum/reed-hundt-saving-privacy

[DanBC]

> If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.

You have two versions of your business card. One goes to anyone and has a junk email. The other goes to wanted contacts, and has an email that you pay attention to.

[verisimilidude]

Exactly. For most people, that's probably enough. I couldn't see the business case for creating a whole social network out of the concept.

For myself though, I could easily see creating 9 or 10 cards for different situations. It'd be nice to have an easy way to manage all that.

[joering2]

What you need is an "premium" email at a "premium e-mail provider". :)

You signed up as Joe Doe and plug your basic info: website url, physical address, your real email address, phone number cell phone, etc. All this can be in multitude quantity, like your email: office job 1, office job 2, personal. All this info is confidential and only seen to you.

Then your conference comes in. You click "create addresses" and system is randomly generating your email addresses, like this:

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

Then for each email you can setup few options, like:

- forward this email to office job 1

- forward this email to office job 2

- forward this email to my personal email

- if someone emails me at this email, send them autoreply with short profile: my homepage url, my pshysical address, my office phone, but no cell phone.

- if someone emails me at this email, send them autoreply with my personal cellphone.

When forwarding your email you can have optional header, such as extra info you added initially: "this is my Word Expo 2014". Then when 2016 comes in and you receive an email, header tells you the origin of it.

You can setup any email to hold on mail and not forward it at all and just notify you once a week/month/once there is X emails awaiting.

At any point you can dispose an email or simply set it to auto-expire. Or change its settings for that matter.

You have two options when it comes to your presentatione. You can go high tech and print (or request print) of business cards with QR code where each code is your CRF card with different email of course. In this scenario you could have different color of qr code representing different email setup and just memorize: green qr code - potential investors, yellow qr code - potential employees, blue qr code - cute blonde that i think likes me!

Or even simplier solution: order yourself a few thousand business cards with your email address like this: "[e-mail]" and then just write down the email number after the pre-printed part of your email address that will match particular premium email #. And if someone asks about it, just tell them a perfect excuse: "oh yeah i get so much spam that once a year i have to create a new email for myself".

Someone building such a system could call it similar to gmail so your emails look normal, like maybe pmail.com (for "premium" mail) or something like it.

I think the problem is that this is very niche market. I am sure for a right solution you would pay even $99 per year, but again it would be hard to market and even harder to make some money long-term off of it :)

[davmre]

You can actually do this with gmail itself: [e-mail] is a valid alias for [e-mail], for any value of x. So you can make up whatever set of custom addresses you want; they all go to the same account, and filtering/forwarding/etc. can be done with standard gmail filters (not sure about autoresponses; you'd probably need a third-party client for that).

Of course this plus-sign behavior is a pretty well-known fact about Gmail, so it'll be obvious that you're bucketing your email in this way. Anyone can easily read off the 'base' address [e-mail], so you'd need to set it up so that mail to this address is heavily restricted and anyone wanting to actually reach you would have to use [e-mail] or whatever. But I think this would basically also be true of any custom service you could invent having similar functionality.

[PeterWhittaker]

But gmail basically does this now with the +: [e-mail], [e-mail], etc.

[joering2]

Exactly. Anyone know this "trick" so I can envision people that didnt have the response back in a day or two, just remove the + part thinking exactly what you said -- my email went to some less-important folder.

I, for example, always remove the + part. Not sure why, just a behavior. Even if wrong, still it is what it is.

Besides, I don't think you can discard your email. So if you had [e-mail] and month later you decided you don't want anymore email from this account, you would have to setup rule for this email to go to spam, which is not a perfect scenario. Better would be an auto-response that e-mail expired. Something like PlutoMail is doing.

[Swizec]

> If any of you can figure out how to make this work, I'd definitely pay for it.

I don't give out business cards. I tell people to google me and send me an email or a tweet or whatever they end up finding.

This filters out everyone who doesn't have a really good reason to contact me because they just won't care enough to invest the 30s of extra time it takes to type "swizec" into google and click a link.

[samastur]

I think the main purpose of business cards today is to serve as a physical reminder of who you met, not to provide you contact info which can be found elsewhere.

Memory is not the best keeper of information at conferences where you might meet tens of people.

[soneca]

Well, based on the thread I created a quick mockup of the app I envisioned: http://invis.io/9K181IPES

If anyone cares to contribute (or develop), feel free.