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.

At the beginning of this month I wrote about why I thought invites for uninteresting webapps could more and more be considered a type of spam. I was blaming both the users that let the app invite everyone they wanted, and the apps that just didn’t keep record of who they already spammed.

Now, there is news of a new webapp named Quechup (I’m not linking to them on purpose) that recently took it to the next level by just inviting everyone in your address book, even if you have told them not to do that. Eventually this leads to a “virus” much like those old school email viruses that spread themselves by mailing everyone in the receivers address book. The app has been in the news quite a lot, and I think it proves some of my point, including the fact that it stupid that people are starting to regard invites as something normal without thinking.

Obviously this new trend shows an even worse trend of people giving their email login details to any random app! People should realize that email functions much like a single sign-on at the moment, meaning that with your email login details anyone could get access to any of your other websites. I hope more people will start to realize that we need to develop and adopt new technologies that will enable apps to intercommunicate without having to share the login details.

Recently I have been spoiled with invites for so called “private Betas“, so much even that I had to add some of these web companies to my spam list. I simply don’t even want to try out these web apps anymore, because they simply annoyed me too much.

What is the problem? It is that these web2.0 tools have every new user select everyone from their Gmail/Hotmail/YahooMail contact list and send them a mass invite. Not only is this not personal, it can also lead to more than 10 invites for one person. I already received 11 invites for Doostang, an app that I am not going to try, although it might be very useful. (I actually received more that 1 invite from 1 person! Thank you Chakib!)

I seriously like some of the new web apps, but in the beginning of the “invite”-hype it was an honour to get an invite simply because they were scarce. These days, an invite is as common as the air we breath (although I don’t consider air spam!) and I simply consider them spam because they annoy me and I can’t seem to unsubscribe from them. Invites these days are overrated, impersonal, and highly annoying.

So how can web apps change this phenomenon? A couple of things come to mind. First of all I would like to see a “refuse all future invites”-button that I can click to stop (so-called) friends from sending me invites. If I can’t do that, than an unwanted invite means as much to me as unsolicited mail - a.k.a. spam.

Secondly, I think that any product should be able to engage people to make contacts on their own. If people need to make contacts to further enjoy their product, then it will automatically motivate them to invite their friends. And if I get a personal invite from a friend via Twitter, MSN, or email, then creates so much more impact than some automated message. Obviously the problem that arises here is that if your product actually sucks, it makes sense to have people invite their friends automatically as soon as you can!

In the end I realized that any web app that has to use some kind of automated and impersonal invite scheme to got their users to invite their friends is probably a rubbish product to start with. So remember, if anyone send me loads of invites for the same product, I will automatically thank you for the “regard this product as useless”-notification you just virtually generated.