I am constantly digging out old business cards and calling the number to find that the contact information has changed. Wouldn't it be better to have a serial number printed on your business card. When you change your contact details you update the information on the common website. On the other side - if you have old contacts for someone that seem to have changed, you go to the common website, enter the person's serial number and presto: there are the new contact information details. Subscribers could have business cards with the common website and their serial number made - without any contact details (especially useful if they change often). The service could go one step further, allowing people to share other people's contact details (their business card collection), store other peoples business cards (links to serial numbers that are updated automatically) online (their address lists), etc.
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Who would administer the website? The government?
Do you realize that what you're basically proposing is a centrally administered digital national ID database?
Do you have any idea how valuable this resource would be to crackers and identity thieves and stalkers?
You know it's going to get cracked at some point. Do you want your information in that database? I sure don't.
Some students of mine created something not that different; see minfile.com. The way their system works, you manage your contact info on your card. Then anyone who has your address in their book has the info replaced by a link to your card. (You can have different cards so that some people would not get your home number.) I think this makes a great deal of sense for a compnay directory (including alums of the company) and for a college class.
plaxo.com does this for outlook
It would never work... Whoever is dumb enough to list their contact info on a central database deserves all the SPAM (unsolicited commercial email) they will get.
This is a live application doing what you mention: https://www.plaxo.com/ It works great.
1) of course the Government would nt be involved. And maybe you misunderstand, by business cards I mean paper cards with your name and company, position and contact details that you give when you meet smoeone (also called visit cards). The information you have on these are public information that you WANT other people to have.2) The system I propose is similat to Plaxo but would go a step further by integrating it with business cards (what I explained above). You could even add a revenue flow by printing the business cards for companies with the unique serial number printed on them. Plaxo is a start but they have not gone far enough in one sense and gone too far in the sense of expecting people to put their personal contact list on a public server (open to cracking). The information I have on my business cards I fully expect to be public and in fact want it to be for business reasons. I would never use Plaxo for private contacts OR my entire contact list as I think it would be a violation of the trust of the people that gave me their private contact information. I would store and maybe even share my collection of business contacts accumalated from exchange of business cards, however3) The system would have a choice for public (shared) contact or private (unshared).
Personally, I think interpersonal contact networks are a more effective way of doing this. Meet some powerful/connected people (through a university or local government group) and then meet people they know. And then people they know, etc etc.
Here's a website on some good interpersonal networking skills:http://www.canadaone.com/ezine/expert/expert39.html
Plaxo.com is doing this since years.
As of now, there's a site that does some of this, but you only get access to it if you allow your own info to be posted. According to the site, LinkedIn, 23 million professionals use it. Here's the link:http://www.linkedin.com/