We’re not exactly sure how long it’s been around (it appears to have launched late this Fall), but we recently came across a simple widget service with no press coverage to date called Hyplet that helps you create digital business cards and flyers. You can spread them around the web by embedding in blogs, social networks, websites, and emails.
Hyplet’s end product is nothing fancy, just a simple HTML snippet that references an image hosted on the company’s servers. Most of the service’s value comes from its user-friendly image creation tool that lets you arrange text and images, pick styles, and add links from within the browser. It’s obviously targeted at people with little or no knowledge of Photoshop or similar graphics programs. While Hyplet has templates for both business cards and flyers, you can modify them and add your own images to create widgets for any purpose.
I can see individual MySpace users taking advantage of Hyplet to put flyers on each other’s profiles, but I can’t see the service being used for serious viral campaigns. The themes are too limited and the publishing options require you to manually add your widgets in one place at a time (there’s no help from widget distribution services like Gigya or ClearSpring here). There’s also the issue of monetization; Hyplet doesn’t appear to have any source of revenue yet so I’d be concerned that my hosted images wouldn’t be around in the future.
It’s also really easy to take out the part of the HTML that promotes Hyplet itself, which I did to the business card above so it could be floated to the left (and no, that’s not my real contact information).
Is virtual Rolodex their next step?
Would be helpful to be able to collect and store all these cards……
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200.....trepreneur
SOMEONE PLEASE COVER THIS STORY!
It looks pretty simple and helpful - I’ll have to take a look some time!
Dom
Mark - you might want to check the phone number - i called it but only got a message saying it’s invalid
I like hyplet its easy to add on my myspace profiles & few of my blogs , it also easy to edit the hyplet its a great find
@4: he also mistyped all the other info - I checked it and it doesn’t work….
Goodness, and these people write news - when they can’t even type correctly their phone numbers and IDs….
hahaha
of course, the “hahaha” was ironic and I didn’t check anything
Allen: you don’t publish such information on a site that 600k+ people visit daily.
@4 - @6 : And I thought everyone knew 555 was a movie biz number (aka, intentionaly fake). /shrug
How many applets are aimed at html/php/java impaired users and how long before the end user learns to code such simple things for themselves remains to be seen. Somehow, it feels like its going to be a good long while.
Isn’t this what http://www.lyro.com is doing, but only a year behind? At least with Lyro you can create and manage multiple card and identity from a single account.
people - I WAS KIDDING lol
tho i didn’t go so far as to test the email and skype
Looks unnecessary, but convenient. I also like how you have a -skype suffix in your MySpace username on the card.
… tried it using the newest ff beta 2. plugin installed correctly, but that’s it. how to activate and use it? (already entered my account details in the add-on)
Great building blocks for Web 3.0 (inasmuch as Plaxo)..
Wow!
I think that it is great! And I have noticed it doesn’t use flash at all!!!
So simple, but probably one hell of the work they had to do for this game!