Reinvention of the Business Card (v1.3)

I took some time today and this past weekend to do some additional tweaks to my Business Card. It’s been proving to be a nice lesson towards some of the changes happening with HTML5 and CSS3, but also gives me a chance to think about how I go about information sharing and exactly how much I’d like to expose.

A Small Recap
To those who might be just looking at this as some kind of off project, this is essentially how I’ve been rocking with a business card for almost two years. There’ are some neat wrinkles with my implementation:

• The landing page is hosted on one of two mobile devices that I own, using FineWS for Symbian
• Outside of my logo image, everything is done in CSS
• There’s a link on the page that activates a script which turns the page into a downloadable vCard

Unlike when I had this implementation on my Nokia Mobile Web Server Presence page, this one isn’t (yet) connected to aspects such as the state of my calendar (meeting, etc.) or phone profile state (normal, meeting, silent, active, etc.). I’m also not yet playing with location. For a few reasons, and the privacy of many people that I interact with, I just won’t worry about this part at this time. That being said, I do want to get to the point where my mobile is able to at least show my area to trusted persons again. That aspect of the Nokia MWS was indeed useful.

Beyond just passively showing information, I’d like this card to be a empowering agent. If you will, giving me a bit more control over what I expose on my social graph, while also helping me to better keep track of it. I’d also like to use this as a means of learning a bit more about behaviors and patterns related to communication to which we many times apply tech to make more efficient, but might always be as communicative.

Changes in This Iteration
This is only a tweak, and as such is the thrid tweak that has happened with the FineWS version of a business card (hence the designation of 1.3). Here’s some of what I did this time around:

• Changed the measurements for the body width, and the two internal container widths from percentages to full pixels (this might go ems at some point soon)
• Added an icon and URL for Symbian Ideas
• Changed MMM panel to large, obscured ‘M’ and color scheme
• Now validated in HTML5

In effect, nothing too major there, and at the same time, a constant tweaking and perfecting of the business card’s digital presence vesus the interactive one.

A major future change is to make this something printable in the traditional business card format. That’s going to take just a bit more understanding of a few aspects of things since I’d like to continue to stick to CSS for these presentation layer changes.

Nevertheless, doing all of this on one page (and a light one at that at just under 11K), means that there’s all kinds of fun that I can eventually start to have with this. Adding JavaScript elements will allow me to do things such as poll for device data, or expose status information via REST APIs. And I’ll hopefully get there. This is some of what I was hoping to do with the Nokia MWS.

In terms of what’s possible, and the various implications, the choice and imaginations are mine to explore. In the meanwhile, I’ll use this to continue to challenge convention, and to add some necessary skills to my toolkit.