Have a personal domain name but not sure whether you should have it redirect to your blog, Facebook profile, LinkedIn or Twitter account? Lacking the time or skills to set up a web presence of your own where you can point to all of them at will? Card.ly is here to save the day.
Inspired by the look of the personal web page of interface designer Tim Van Damme, the team over at Harkness Labs set out to build a service where people can easily add their online profiles, pick a theme and create a good-looking online mini business card of their own in just a couple of minutes. Having lots of experience with quickly setting up and launching light-weight Web services (check out the CrunchBase profile for the company’s founder Daniel Blake for a list of other projects), it didn’t take them too long to come up with a good enough concept.
After a month or so of coding, Card.ly is now live. I love it (here’s mine), and I’m going to send the link to a bunch of my friends. It’s a bit more limited in scope than Chi.mp (our coverage) and a different approach from Unhub (our coverage), but I doubt there’s an easier way to create custom social hubs that look so damn good than Card.ly.
Once you add personal details and your various online profiles (nearly 50 are currently supported, from LinkedIn to Yelp and our own CrunchBase), you can pick a custom theme out of nearly 30 proposed designs – most of which are free, others are only available with premium accounts – and automatically have your online business card published. It’s hCard compliant and people can download a vCard from your personal Card.ly profile by clicking the recognizable icon under the title.
You can also embed widgets for your profile, which I have done at the top of this post. Finally, some themes support a ‘Stream’ tab, which basically doubles as a lifestreaming web application by pulling together all the activity from the profiles you added to your Card.ly account.
Card.ly is free when you’re content with a limited choice of skins and RSS feeds, as well as couple of other restrictions, but there’s a premium version that will set you back $24.99 a year. The paid account comes with more themes to choose from, unlimited RSS streams, and more goodies like advertisement-free cards. Not as cheap as I’d like it to be, but I paid for it just for the fact that I can link to my Google Analytics account and get advanced statistics on my personal card.
Your opinion?
Nice and simple…this could be just the thing I have been looking for to setup my personal domain name.
Way to expensive…
Should be FREE or maximum $5 lifetime fee. Then once you get a ton of users figure out how to further monetize it.
Way too expensive…
Should be FREE or maximum $5 lifetime fee. Then once you get a ton of users figure out how to further monetize it.
Erm, the service IS free. There is a premium membership, but the basic service is free. And you got almot all the features.
The Premium is way too expensive and the features of the FREE version are not sufficient since there are very few skins…But I didn’t spend much time on the site. That was just a quick impression.
Sites should monetize out the gate more often, and I’m happy to see a site that plans to offer a service and do exactly that. It’s a reasonable rate in my opinion. $2.99/month! That aint shit.
They won’t get very far out of the gate at that price…In my opinion
Sure it is reasonable. But on the internet it won’t work. Why? Because the barrier to entry is so low that someone will come along and offer something similar or better for free. I say even at $0.25 it won’t work. It is too much of a hassle to pay for something like this.
Considering paypal takes 30 cents + 2.9%, I dont imagine your 25 cent thing working very well.
Doesn’t LinkedIn already have a public profile which is basically what this is?
Sweet, I’m gonna go use this right now! [LINK REMOVED by TechCrunch]
Who needs a card when we’ve got techcrunch comment area?!
Call me!
(805) 768-4521 http://bit.ly/oBsDJ
Funny but true.
How secure is this? Your e-mail address is up there for all the world so see (and for spammers to scrape). Your name and date of birth are also displayed. People have suffered identity theft attacks by releasing less personal information than this.
If you looked at the source, you would see that the email is seperated as to not be recognized by bots. The data you want to display is all optional is well. Only display what you want.
It would be cool to have an option to hide the email address with the Recapcha mail-hide service as an extra layer of security.
…but….there are BAD PPLS on teh interwebz!
These demos like *very* similar to the portfolio that Tim Van Damme created.
http://timvandamme.com/
woops mentioned in article must of skipped over that.
I’d like to see them putting microformats on the data.
RTFM.
The site supports hCard, mate.
I love it although I’m obviously biased as the founder of Inkd.com
Kelly Smith
I’ve been using Nombray to accomplish a similar thing. They take a slightly different approach and have a stronger focus on branding your name on the web.
Looks nice. Was thinking of doing something like this myself. But can I use my own domain?
Yes, with a premium membership: http://card.ly/premium.php
I can’t see that page without creating an account…?
I tried logging in and i never received a confirm email after registration and it wont let me login with my username pw. been getting more like this?
lame.ly
Very cool.
Sounds good.
http://getOnePage.com is about launching soon.. you can register to beta test …
Hmmm….looks an awful lot like Tim van Damme’s design: http://timvandamme.com/
(RTFM, Matt! He inspired it! Got it, thanks
Not overly impressed – set up an account, put my details in and chose a skin but pretty underwhelmed with the end result.
It’s ok but the page just looks empty, the free skins are very average and I am not going to pay just to see if the premium skins are any better (i doubt they are much different).
My page is looking empty because I don’t really want to put up much personal data which will then be scraped so not sure I totally get this product??
New skins will be available very, very soon. Both free and premium. Weve got something like 50 skins and counting.
Great site! And price points.
Perfect for the email signature that many never get around to creating.
http://card.ly/charliedavis
FYI – The first two themes I tried didn’t work – but there are always bugs to work through.
I’d sign up for a pro account as soon as they let me modify the themes myself to create something that looks better than what they have.
This is okay but not very easy to use… and WAY WAY WAY to expensive. I mean, why would you pay $29 a year. The free version limits you to 4!!! only 4 feeds. And, the designs are not as cool as the custom ones built by those designers!
Thats 4 RSS enabled streams for the “Stream” page- You can have as many social networks for yourself.
Oh… but still! Why??? FriendFeed allows you to have as many as you want for the “stream”!
lame for people who know how to use computers, not so lame for the rest – but – for the rest it IS lame because the URL is horrible!! google profiles are easier, sorry…nobody cares about what looks like a ripped off wordpress theme with some icons on a template…for 25 bucks, you could have this site built on your own domain (or less)…just my opinion, but clearly it’s good enough for techcrunch
It reminds me of http://www.iMetMatt.com and all the “I Met” websites it spawned.
Great site! Just created my mini profile hub @ http://card.ly/charliedavis #cardly
I am using http://gluegl.me/
great site and great service, but as facebook user said, it’s a bit too expensive for the premium. 5 $/ year and you have a big premium user Base, and very few free users.
similar service to mynameise.com…
Not at all.
Is it free of charge? LOL
Yes.
It’s way to expensive !
> With Digitrad’s latest product, http://Yes.tel, get your digital ID on the web for less than 19.99 USD a year !
Use this VIP voucher to have a big discount : VIP69007 on http://www.digitrad.com.
And get also a local free fone number and personalised email : firstname@surname.tel
And get 100 Moo business card with your .tel ID FOR FREE.
> The .tel platform is…
– DISTRIBUTED and SCALABLE: based on the standard DNS technology
- OPEN and EXTENSIBLE: any contact field types are accepted and usable
- MODERN: full APIs, tagging, search keywords infrastructure
- SECURE: complete public/private infrastructure, at the field and friend level
And finally, Digitrad invites you to test the new phone included in Yes.TEL offer.
Download this phone and you will be able to call for free landlines and mobile phones of .TEL community members in more than 40 countries. This free offer with no commitment is at least available for 3 months !!!
If they are giving a free domain name i might at least consider it but for 24.95 it just baffles me – why should it cost any more than what it costs to register a domain name like firstname-lastname.com – they should have a dollar sale 99p and sign up people – but a good idea – it does solve a problem but its not the right price.
Readers of this post might want to check out OnePage.me
Just about ready to launch. Leave your email on the landing page to be notified when ready.
Similar to card.ly in some ways, but coming from a slightly different angle. From reading this post and its comments, I’m sure some of you will love it
I think the http://imetmatt.com idea is a lot easier and, frankly, hipper than anything else.
Roll your own.
Douglas
http://imetdouglas.com
Check out GizaPage.com, which allows people to discover actual pages instead of just urls like in card.ly, I like this tiny biz card service though
.
Email contact form doesn’t work for those profiles where email address is hidden. Messages aren’t forwarded to intended inbox.
Cool to have such a simple link of all but weird to have all that contact info there for anyone though
Digital business cards are the wave of the future. Digital can be shared fast and spread around unlike having to hand out paper business cards.
I think with the rising online businesses real business cards are become just thing your leave yourself notes on. To contact a company you just email them. Why not link them to an online card with a little more pizzaz. Also if you give someone your card that is just to give someone your phone number quickly, why not have a web site letting you choose a theme for it, like wordpress, and make an online card and a printable one to share. The printable one can cost money but the online one should be free. Like Chris Anderson’s book Free says; all people in the 21 century assume internet stuff is free. Like wordpress, wikipedia, facebook, twitter, and the list goes on… And this is true and should be for card.ly! Why charge? no other internet service really does and they are fine, even more than fine for some.
I’ve been using ClaimID, which offers a lot of the same service, w/out fees, (but no feeds), and functions as openid also.
I don’t know…I think I’d rather direct people to my website, personally, and link to my social networking profiles there. More control over design and I can provide more information about what I do and answers to potential questions.
so cool!
Hmmmmm. Interesting business idea and good execution. It’d be one thing if this startup was going to kill $15 pop CDs. But business cards cost pennies each.
With more of our world going virtual, I think the value of business cards are increasing due to their physical presence.