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While we move towards a paperless society, we love sharing our business cards. Even though there are many apps which have tried to address this problem, individuals enjoy the ritual of sharing their business cards. As my friend Ravi Vyas says, it’s drop dead simple to exchange cards. The entry barriers for digitizing this single use case is both the parties need to have the app in order for one to communicate with the other. Well, Google can mitigate this with a simple feature in Google Now, powered by their own NearbyAPI. Well, lets not talk about them, they can do anything. What if this was a built into LinkedIn. In 2011, LinkedIn acquired CardMunch and shut it down. CardMunch, Bump and some other similar apps had the same entry level barrier we talked about.
LinkedIn is great
LinkedIn is awesome, atleast in some aspects. Looking for a job, networking and building a brand for yourself. I meet a lot of new people on a regular basis, mostly at meetups or when someone needs advice and help with their tech stack or apps. Sometimes we even exchange cards but most of the times, we end up connecting on LinkedIn.
The Problem
Exchanging business cards is just a half-life for the purpose the business card was printed. It eventually converts when you remember or recall about meeting a person, look for his/her card and try to reach them with the information provided. Most of the cases, we end up misplacing them or don’t find them when we actually need them.
The Solution
Most of the folks today have the LinkedIn App on their phone. Even if they do not have the app, the mobile web is good enough. Along with your inbox/messaging and connection requests, LinkedIn can have a card inbox, where we can simply add LinkedIn cards. Then again the interaction has to be as simple as pulling the phone out of our pockets, launching the app and click a button. There are ways in which this can be achieved, Google’s Nearby API, NFC, QR Codes, simple code pairing and what not. After we have exchanged cards, later we can connect with them on LinkedIn and maybe do business.
This is the beginning of a series of missing features for various applications and platforms that I use on a daily basis and think might be really useful. There are moments where I feel, shit they could do this, it might help a lot of people, or maybe it might improve the overall experience or may be an interesting experiment. In the #MissingFeaturesSeries will talk about all these moments.