TwtMyCard : Exchanging Business Cards via Twitter
Posted by: Clarity Blogs: ASP.NET,
on 09 Sep 2009 |
View original | Bookmarked: 0 time(s)
Anand Iyer told me about an idea he had for an application to exchange business cards over Twitter called TwtMyCard. I wanted to experiment a bit with ASP.NET MVC, Windows Azure and Twitter bots so I offered to help build the first version. Plus I thought it would make a nice demo application for some of the work we do at Clarity since we cant always show off the applications we build for clients. And so TwtMyCard was born. Anand already wrote a nice post describing the functionality and benefits.
Here are some of the reasons I like the idea for the application:
- Unlike Facebook, its easy to export out your contacts No walled garden here, its your data where you want it
- You can quickly add your profile by uploading your vCard from Outlook and avoid the pain of entering the same profile information into a new site
- Lots of people already network via Twitter so this seems like a natural extension
- You dont have to follow each other on Twitter or create some relationship on another social network - If you just want to exchange contact info, you can do that with TwtMyCard
- Better for the environment Unless your business card is die-cut, foil-stamped and embossed , its probably going to just get thrown out at some point
- Since you can send a tweet via SMS, you can use TwtMyCard from any mobile phone. Although if you are using a Twitter client you should check out Gadfly (gratuitous cross-promotional plug).
Here are a few other notes on the functionality:
- You dont need to create a login for TwtMyCard. You login to Twitter via OAuth and it passes a token to TwtMyCard to authenticate you. This way we dont collect your Twitter credentials and you have one less password to remember.
- Your business card is marked private by default meaning that you have to send it someone before they can view it unless you mark your profile public. The cards are sent via the TwtMyCard account so it will show up in the recipients feed as a mention. Through the TwtMyCard site you can also send cards from your own account or a direct message.
- You can quickly import your profile by uploading a vCard. You can also export anyones contact info as a vCard or by exporting to Google contacts. (Export to Live contacts coming soon)
- Everyones saved card uses the hCard microformat. If you have a microformat plug-in for your browser like Oomph for Internet Explorer or Operator for FireFox then you get some bonus functionality. Below is a screenshot of the awesome looking Oomph plug-in.
If you like TwtMyCard or have any ideas youd like to see implemented, let us know.
In future blog posts Ill talk a little more about the code for TwtMyCard and some of my thoughts on Azure and ASP.NET MVC. Overall the experience of using MVC on Azure was pleasant minus some issues I had with Azure. Also JQuery, Blueprint CSS, TweetSharp and the Famfamfam icons sped up the development effort considerably. Thanks to all the developers / designers who built those. Not that its a super complicated application, but its great when you can mix and match some proprietary code and some open source code in a few nights to create a (hopefully) scalable web app. And big thanks to Anand for the idea and help launching the site.
