The developers of my facecard have tried to solve the conundrum of modern social connections. There are contact cards and there are address books, and there are friends lists… And your friends have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn profiles, and multiple email addresses, plus you text and call them. Socializing in the digital age is a many-headed monster. It’s easy, in theory, to stay connected. But it’s certainly not organized.
The app my facecard seems to have two main goals: One, to make all of that information easy to share and easy to access, and two, to let users share their information in a creative, personalized, expressive manner. To accomplish all of this, it provides a way for users to create their own “facecards,” essentially contact cards which are self-designed and customized. These digital cards (reminiscent of business cards, but more personal) have two “sides,” each customizable with an uploaded image, design, or photo chosen by the user. This serves as the background for the user’s contact information, including social networking accounts.
The app opens with a brief introduction slide to give you an idea of what you’re doing, and then walks you through each step of card creation. To add your contact information, you fill out the brief profile form, which the app incorporates into your facecard with a pleasing layout. This form includes name, work and personal email addresses, phone number, and Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. The contact information is then translated into self-explanatory icons by the app to be presented on your facecard. Once your facecard is saved, it’s uploaded to the app’s server, and from there you can share it with friends.
One of the best features of my facecard is the ability to sync your contacts to the cloud—so you never lose one, or accidentally delete one from your phone, or worry about having storage space. The app is trying to find a particular niche, something smaller and more manageable than a social networking profile that contains the same information, but more creative and appealing than an address book contact card. Whether or not it can pull this off—that really depends on the user experience. Right now, it’ll depend on its ability to attract users to start with, since you need to be my facecard users to share information mutually. But, if you are, there’s a handy way to share if you’re together in person: the “bump” feature allows users to exchange my facecard information by tapping their phones together.
My only main gripe with the app is the inability to create multiple facecards for different purposes. For example, what if I’d like to create a work facecard, a family facecard, a friends facecard, and a “someone I just met at a party” facecard? As it is, I have to delete and recreate a new facecard every time I want to change the info, which strikes me as awkward.
You can download my facecard now on iTunes, for nothing! Download it and give it a shot—just think carefully about what links you’ll want to share with anyone you know that joins up.
