geek!daily

Reports of the Business Card's Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, or why bzCards != biz cards

Caught the article "rmbr launches mobile app to get rid of business cards" on VentureBeat which covers the announcement rmbrME, the new electronic connection tool from rmbr. (note: the rmbr.com site, which launched as a photo organizing site, currently redirects to rmbrme.com) The general idea is to trade vCards over email, IM, SMS, etc. and get rid of those pesky piles of pasteboard. If the ease of use isn't incentive enough, they're mixing in the funware idea via contests and leaderboards.

You may have guessed by now, but I think they've got the beginnings of a good idea and a poor implementation. I'm particularly amused by rmbr founder Gabe Zichermann's assertion that the business card's time has come and gone. Here's why I think he's wrong:

1. Business Cards Are Infinitely Customizable: I can quickly extend or personalize the information provided by my business card*. I can also correct bad information on the spot*, e.g. my title's changed, or I have a new phone number. And the only device required is any writing instrument.
2. Business Cards Don't Require Information Exchange: I don't have to ask you to give me contact info in order to give you my contact info. This preserves a level of anonymity which should not be undervalued. I wouldn't give contact info to everyone I've accepted a business card from; I've later chosen to contact some of those people.
3. Business Cards Are Trivial To Distribute: I can hand you a business card in just a few seconds, less if I'm already handing them out. I can place a stack of business cards in a tray on a counter to be taken by those interested without having to make any contact at all. I can drop them in the fishbowl of an excellent bakery and cafe in Wilson, NC in hopes of winning some goodies for the next time I'm there. I can hand it to someone who doesn't have a device. These examples all demonstrate the business card's continued practical utility.
4. Business Cards Are Static: They provide a clearly limited, time-sensitive set of information about me. If I change jobs, companies, phone numbers, email, or what-have-you, your data isn't current anymore. Effectively, the data ages and, in doing so, provides me some additional privacy with regards to those people with whom I've not formed a more permanent relationship than the original business card exchange (which, if I have, I likely want to provide a more dynamic link to my contact info). This is also true of a vCard exchange, but unclear with regards to bzCards. In my opinion, the lack of an analog to this aging process is a flaw in social networks which is becoming evident; it's currently all or nothing.

That said, I applaud the attempt toward a more dynamic contacts list and easier connections. There are some pieces still missing that, imho, are being overlooked by folks headed in that direction, but they'll come soon enough. And I'm utterly underwhelmed by the idea of competitions to send out the most business cards. It's quality, folks, not quantity.

* The business card with hand-written phone number comes from a 1997 Mother Jones article. Ironically, that lovely corrected business card image is from the "Why Use It?" page of MyDetails.biz, another digital business card replacement.

 

Me @ LinkedIn.com

Today is my first day as the manager of light engineering development at LinkedIn and I'm incredibly excited about it. Why's that, you might ask? Because LED is the group that's bringing agile development and Ruby on Rails to LinkedIn.

Who says Rails isn't ready for the enterprise? ;p

Scripting News for 8/22/07 « Scripting News Annex

From Dave Winer's blog Scripting News, How Things Get Better:

[...] Before he had fully settled in I knew it wasn’t going to work. I was able to play out, in my mind, what was about to happen. The software would say nothing to him, so how could he know what to do. I waited and what I predicted did happen. He looked at me and asked “What do I do now?”

That’s where the conversation between product and user begins. [...]

Uncommon common sense. Engage your customers in a conversation and listen carefully -- they'll tell you everything you need to know.

Three Observations on Reverse Engineering

I'm working on the tech slides for our presentation deck today. The purpose is to demonstrate that not only do we have something (and we do =), but that it's easier to buy us than to rebuild us. This got me thinking about what influences how easy or hard it is to reverse engineer a thing. Here's what struck me as true.

1. It's straightforward to reverse engineer an existing product feature. The cost of doing so varies in direct proportion to the opacity and complexity of the feature.

2. It's more difficult to reverse engineer existing workflow as embodied in code (e.g. a pipeline) as it requires knowledge of the pipeline's foundations as well as an understanding of the nuances of its implementation. Lacking the nuances, you'll repeat the mistakes of others; lacking the foundations, you'll go horribly astray. The cost of doing so varies in direct proportion to your knowledge of the process, its basis and nuances, and your experience in working with it and its variations.

3. Most difficult is to reverse engineer strategy, which can be considered as the implicit fundamental knowledge and intent in which a product's features and workflow are grounded. The cost of doing this varies in direct proportion to your insight into the mind(s) formulating and executing that strategy.

You are not your product. You are not your workflow. You are your ideas.

A Change of Pace

One or both of you who read this blog may already know this, but today was my first full-time day with Cucina Media, we the makers of Public Square.

Today I:

• Fed my kids breakfast
• Saw them off to school (Beth took them)
• Talked with my partners about what the week holds in store
• Talked with our development partners about what we need to do in the next few weeks
• Met with a couple of prospective customers
• Talked at length with Christina about the focus of our next week, month, and quarter
• Chatted with Rob, a long-time friend and colleague who's just returned to the US after ~9 months in Asia
• Picked up Sam after pre-school
• Went grocery shopping with Sam in tow
• Cooked dinner for the family
• Played Elmo Uno with Beth and Sam
• Posted to my blog

It was an intense business day, with five meetings squeezed into six hours. We discussed everything from what needs to be done in the next week to the different opportunities out there for us and what it would mean -- to our company and to our values -- to take this or that one. Values. Objectives. What we want to do and why. Good stuff like that.

It was a very happy day. =]

Cool Blog: Creating Passionate Users

Wandering through some blogs and ran across Kathy Sierra's "Creating Passionate Users" blog, about which I can't say enough nice things. She hits a number of my favorite issues, such as:

Link: Creating Passionate Users: Ultra-fast release cycles and the new plane.
Link: Creating Passionate Users: Death by risk-aversion.
Link: Creating Passionate Users: The hi-res user experience.
Link: Creating Passionate Users: Conversational writing kicks formal writing's ass.

And one that made me smile, too:

Link: Creating Passionate Users: Code like a girl.

I'll be spelunking her archives for quite some time, I suspect.

Bring Your Own Laptop To Work?

Don Marti blogged an idea that's been floating around for a while: what if, instead of corporate IT supplying you a desktop which is largely underutilized, the company paid you a "laptop allowance" of some sort and you brought/brought your own? While it's less feasible in the CG industry (those desktops are makin' pixels, so we need 'em around and all ;), it makes great sense in all sorts of other contexts -- and was something I was begging for ca. 2000 when I was a "pre-sales technical consultant."

 

There's heated discussion in the comments of Don's post which largely divides into "Right On!" and "IT's Worst Nightmare." Most of the latter seem to miss Don's point: the user owns the laptop; IT supplies and supports only the services (network connection, DHCP for IP address and pointers to directory services such as DNS and LDAP, etc.) Users get some amount of free tech support per year (Don suggests "two major incidents" where I'd suggest one hour per week which accumulates with a 16 hour cap); after that, some sort of billing kicks in, either to the user or to their department.

In the end you have positive motivation ("I get to choose!") and negative motivation ("That's gonna cost me ..."). Sounds like a good closed system to me.

Link: Don Marti business/byol.html.