[FOWA Roundup] MeeCard - A Snippet of Youness Online
So, the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference is over, and it were 2 amazing days. This conference was quite an impressive one and I thank the guys behind Carsonified for giving me the opportunity to attend for free. I plan to do a few “roundups” of some of the exhibitors that were presenting, and this first one is on MeeCard.
I actually had a similar idea to MeeCard a while back when I ran into troubles with my MooCards that had 3 urls on it. I realized that it would make sense to have one central place online where people can find you, your lifestream, your details and your external links on all other websites, without having that content all on your own website. I decided to write something like this as an experiment for me to learn Ruby on Rails but never got much further than this.
The idea behind Meecard (example) is to have one online card that you can “configure” yourself and have it show your lifestream, links to your accounts, personal info, and basically anything more. They haven’t gone public yet so I am hoping to some beta access soon and give it a real try, as it sounds interesting and I would like to see how configurable it is.
I never really went into taking my personal project that seriously, as I noticed in a few discussions with friends that it was pretty hard to get a businessmodel around this. When I asked the same question to the MeeCard guys they noted that they hadn’t really thought about that either.
Tijs Teulings http://blog.tijs.org
October 6th, 2007Isn’t this just another claimid, or any one of it’s competitors?
Cristiano Betta http://cristianobetta.com/
October 6th, 2007Kind of. Problem with claimID is that the guys behind it are kindof not really working on it anymore, nor focussing on using it as a configurable online businescard.
Andy Mitchell http://meecard.com
October 6th, 2007Hey Cristiano - I’m really thrilled you found Meecard interesting. You were by far my toughest ‘customer’ that day - making me sweat
- and I thought it really wasn’t going to be your kind of thing. Drop me an email if you haven’t got in yet, or you want to give some feedback.
On the business model side… it’s not that we haven’t figured out the possibilities yet, more that we don’t know what will work best. For example, for any part of Meecard that helps you save time or gain exposure, that would make a good pro-service; and, if the people search aspect gains traction, there is a Google-esque ad-revenue model to pursue (but restricted to recommending good people, rather than any old product).