VCard and RSS as an alternative to social media | Hacker News Reader

VCard and RSS as an alternative to social media

nfraprado.net

180 pointsnfraprado50 comments

A useful trick that I've been doing for a few years is having a folder with qr code images on my homescreen. Whenever somebody asks me for my linkedin, my phone number, or the wifi access to our office, I just pop out the QR code for that and show it to them on my phone. They scan it and job done.

I started doing this around the time IOS added QR code support to their camera app (six years ago or so). Very fun to watch iphone owners heads explode that were expecting to go through a tedious ritual of typing out a phone number or email address. Still happens occasionally. People are used to awkward and tedious rituals for exchanging contact details and this is the complete opposite.

Very simple to do and very practical. Most phones have QR code support built into their default camera apps now. You don't need any special apps for this. So, there's very little friction with this. Mostly it's just people being unaware that they can do this. There are gazillions of websites where you can create QR codes for web links, vcards, wifi credentials, etc. That part is easy. All you need to do is create a QR code and save it to some location where you can access it from your phone easily and show it to people.

I use Google drive for this but it's pretty easy to find alternatives to that.

Wish I could give ten upvotes for this, there's nothing I like better than a five minute solution to a problem that has plagued me for years.

My problem for years has been that people still ask me for business cards even though I stopped carrying them in like 2005.

Turns out there is a package called qrencode in the Debian repositories so this is as simple as:

$ sudo apt install qrencode

$ qrencode -o linkedin-qrcode.png 'https://www.linkedin.com/in/myprofile'

Plus a few others, personal website, company website etc. All copied into a Google Drive folder as you suggest.

Next time someone asks, boom pop out the qr code.

Brilliant. Thank you.

Try the following:

    echo "RSVP by Text"
    qrencode -t UTF8 'SMSTO:212-555-1212:Thank You! RSVP for (name, number of adults, number of kids)'

    echo "RSVP by Email"
    qrencode -t UTF8 "mailto:rsvp@example.com?subject=RSVP: Some Event&body=[ ] - Yes      [ ] - No"

    echo "Directions"
    qrencode -t UTF8 "1600 Pennsylvania Ave Washington, D.C. 20500"

Plasma lets you generate a QR Code by copying something to the clipboard and clicking on the QR Code button. It is able to display the QR Code, and the QR Code happens to be draggable.

It seems we are very close to add a Save button there, which would be incredibly convenient :-)

That might be for a future contribution.

It also has an option to do the same for Wi-Fi networks, which is pretty cool

Popular apps already have this built in (WhatsApp / LinkedIn / other social media platforms).

My "killer" idea back then was simply putting a LinkedIn-qr-code on back of my business card. Whenever I handed it over to someone (at a conference, mostly), they found it brilliant, scanned it immediately and sent a request on LinkedIn. The good things about this procedure were that:

* I didn't need to keep random people's business card and forge who they were after a 3-5day busy conference, I just had to go to my LinkedIn, and could remember them by their face

* vice versa: they could associate my contact accept with a face. Not to mention that this opened a more direct communication channel with a lesser chance to "ghost" me.

I guess business cards are not really a thing anymore on the more popular conferences that target a younger (engineer) audience.

I did this for some people in my wider team when they were going to events.

Most generated qrcodes (from a URL) will work fine, but LinkedIn is strange as their direct link will open a web browser and not always kick open their app on a persons phone. (The issue mostly seemed to be older versions of iOS that created headaches).

If you’re doing this for LinkedIn, instead open the app on your phone, find your QR code for your profile, screenshot the QR code their app generates, then crop it and use it as you need.

IOS link handling might not be that great on older versions. Probably if you decode that QR code they might be using some custom link scheme that they register for their app. That's still a valid approach but should not be needed with modern phones as you can just register your website urls to be handled by the app.

Two iPhones now also can exchange contact information when you tap them together. Not sure whether this also works for wifi credentials. Sharing wifi credentials does work between contacts if you are on the same wifi as they are trying to join.

Closest thing is that you can view your current WiFi password from settings and copy it to your clipboard. You could probably airdrop that to another iPhone. The feature to share your WiFi may not be far away though.

This helps with the initial exchange of contact information, but keeping it updated for the people that have it is a real challenge, especially if you want to avoid using social media.

I feel like in the time I take to open an app, find a QR code, and they open the camera and scan it, I'd have just told them the 10 digit phonr number and been done with it

that's true, yet before I unlock my phone, Google shows me what song is playing... its almost as if it should not be called a phone because they don't prioritize that functionality.

I also have a QR code in a photo widget. It takes me < 2 seconds to unlock my phone and swipe once on the home screen, and there's usually a delay as people pull out their camera, but there are a couple advantages:

1. People spell my name right. Even when I tell people how to spell my name exactly, they still get it wrong. If they scan my QR code, they always get it right

2. I can put all my info in one place. My vCard has my phone number, several emails, links to my social media, Discord, and whatnot.

3. You can include a photo, if you don't mind making the QR code much larger. With a well optimized image, this can be a nice addition.

wondering how the https://indieweb.org movement and their microformat approach to profiles and the use of RSS feeds isn't already an expression of this idea, only missing bit is the ability to quickly pull a blog contact into one's phone?

What makes social media social is not a user profile and feed. It is the recognition of many types of different relationships between people and the solution for interaction within them. There are friends, family, colleagues at work, parents of other children who are friends with your kid etc etc. You don’t just post updates for each of those audiences, you talk to them, plan shared activities and so on. It is not something you can build with RSS/vCard.

All of that sounds exactly like what RSS/vCard were built for; what part couldn't be done? Comments and replies could be integrated easily enough. You could do this with more RSS, but I've always wanted to build something like this where replies were via emailing a public inbox (from which an RSS feed is generated).

>All of that sounds exactly like what RSS/vCard were built for;

Where exactly in those specs do you see possibility to say „A is friend of B“?

Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF ?

It is a data format, not a protocol. You cannot send a friend request with it.

Besides, FOAF is terribly designed. You cannot take seriously something that has aimChatID and icqChatID in it.

The design is... well it isn't... no excuse but it's suppose to be hidden behind some UI ofc.

Why do I need it anyway? In case I forget who is my mum?

If I ask you for an organized list of your friends, coworkers, relatives etc along with contact details. Would you be likely to share it without asking why?

Sounds like something that should be illegal.

If mum has a public website with her short stories, reading list and her crafts on it one should write a blog post about it. You could also put the vCards in an RSS feed but it wouldn't be as interesting.

I read the topic more like Rum as an alternative for Whiskey

I don’t understand your comment. Do you ask me why do you need FOAF? I have no idea who would need it. This format without a protocol is useless.

Or do you mean, why would you need a protocol? I don’t know your use cases either, but many people have them, preferring to keep certain interactions and content from public eye. A simple website wouldn’t work. Access management and context-specific permissions are needed. A way to request them too.

This topic is more like tomato paste as an alternative for curry chicken with jasmine rice. You can eat it, but the real meal has many more ingredients.

Sounds about right. Part of the access management is doable without adding ingredients. You can add more than one feed. Each public scope can have its own feed. You can have as many kinds of tomato paste as you like.

Maybe you could define the curry, the chicken and the rice more specifically so that we can ponder the availability of something like those ingredients?

I'm not interested in explaining to my mom how she can share the recipes she finds to her friends using XML. The vast majority of folks don't give a flip about the protocol, they just want to talk to people.

Different people use it differently. Each social platform has it's own unique features that one can continue to use along with anything else. How do you play games on RSS/vCard? How buy and sell things? How advertise on it?

Unique features are the least interesting thing in this context. RSS/vCard doesn’t offer the basics that every social platform has.

I had to look up what social media and social networking are. You think of it more from the collaborative side while the topic tends more towards classical rollodex networking and digital media.

Well, that’s why they are called social - because every single of them has a social graph. This is the definition.

Nothing new here. That was the original idea of the (open) semantic web. Failed miserably as all social media companies lock in their customers. Technical solutions have been there for decades. They don’t fit the business model.

If you were just to follow the business model you would end up trap in a situation where big corporations control your social online identity, your goverments and pretty much very inch of exploitable sea and land.

I like the idea of falling miserably over and over again.

That’s the point though.

The technical solutions exist. We need to do better at figuring out how to beat the power of the business model.

The hundreds of billions of dollars that the current lock-in of corporate social media brings in is a powerful tool that companies use to keep better solutions inaccessible to most people.

The other tool they use is the massive use of dark patterns and armies of phds whose only purpose is to keep you hooked onto the product they offer. Like a super drug whose mechanisms can be tailored at an individual level to maximize addiction.

Word

It failed miserably because of poor UX, not business model. Social media conglomerates capitalize on integrated UX and use the power of it to fuel their business models. They do not really lock in their customers the way SaaS vendors do: before I left social media, I had at least 3 or 4 replicas of my social graph, overlapping by at least 80%. Users can move between platforms if there’s any value in it.

There's nothing in here that would technically preclude one from building a nice UI around this and make this have a nice UX where most people wouldn't even need to know that any given protocol like this is being used.

The social media conglomerates would have been able to figure it out instead of building their own proprietary systems for this stuff, if they had wanted to. But, well, they didn't want to.

> There's nothing in here that would technically preclude one from building a nice UI around this and make this have a nice UX

If it were so easy, we would see it already - there’s sufficient demand for this kind of solution. Engineers and STEM graduates in general often fail to understand that technology isn’t always the main constraint. There are harder problems in the world to solve, that actually define the experience. It’s people, it’s regulations and liabilities, it’s financial planning and outcomes etc etc. There exists a technology for many wonderful things, yet we don’t see them and it is not corporations to blame.

Not exactly the same thing but I've been thinking quite a bit about concepts around the idea of "RSS as an alternative to social media". Interestingly just yesterday I started sharing the Beta of something I've been working on around this idea: https://app.recessfeed.com/

Wrote some thoughts about it here: https://github.com/yakkomajuri/recess/blob/main/manifesto-is...

Interesting approach, but links in VCF files are not portable. Android ignores most links, for eg.

I’ve been carrying around my entire VCF file in a QR code (not a link, works offline) these days, and it works nicely with iOS, but Android devices just ignore my social media links.

I've just tried a sample vcf and on my Samsung phone and it shows the URL field (https://codeberg.org/nfraprado/vcf-test/src/branch/pages/vca...) in the contact page. But not the other links. I'm not sure about the iOS contacts app.

I have also been pondering with similar idea. Instagram and Twitter style services could be created with an RSS or RSS-like file format. Biggest problem is content discovery, but the Internet has traditionally solved discovery problem by itself.

https://www.appelsiini.net/2021/decentralized-social-media/

RSS was really great and still is. I still read my blogs using it and ignore the ones which do not offer a feed.

This a solid idea.. I had a pretty painful conference experience a few months back trying to connect with others on LinkedIn. First, trying to log in to LinkedIn on conference wifi was a pain in the ass. Then getting LinkedIn's QR code thingy working was almost impossible and didn't work on their web app.

I think having a section of your own website with quick QR/vcards would be nice.. just open your site and show your card and let them scan.

Keeping contact info updated is a real challenge. I’ve been using neucards as it helps me know who has my info and I can switch which card someone has anytime. Here is my social card if you want to connect - https://www.neucards.com/of/braddominy?id=VOEF1RShv3&k=46QYx...

Does android or or iOS support the update url (and actually check for updates) as part of the vCard as a mechanism to stay up to date.

Could you share what's the property name for the update url?

It's "SOURCE"

But does android or iOS support it and actually check for updates regularly?

To answer myself: I doubt it.

The SOURCE property is optional and apparently more aspirational than real.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57380771/how-to-use-sour...

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6350#section-6.1.3

That's a damn shame. I think that having it update regularly means you can keep in contact if the situation changes.

I like the poster's "open standards" view on the topic.

Of course closed platforms try to destroy this - try downloading your contacts from LinkedIn in vCard format and email one of them. You can do exports, but there won't be email addresses in them! And try to delete a conversation there in order to avoid that it leaks in case one day LI may get hacked - not possible. Smart people don't carry out business conversations on LI but quickly move to another medium.

My hope is that as LinkedIn is increasingly becoming like Facebook, that eventually all people will leave for something simple(r).

By the way, I have started using real paper business cards again. They are more useful if no-one else is giving out any. So after a a conference, guess what attendees find in their bags when they come home? My card.

And when I return from a conference, I go through all contacts I've made and enter some data in a plain text file (the only durable format), with LI still an additional step (but >4000 people that you cannot organize in groups easily makes it a data grave).

You should start a vcards.org business network where people can add their own profile and follow others. You would only need "Create business card" - an interactive editor, a single page HTML form, "Search for Contacts" (a simple Lucene fielded search) + a "Follow" button and a "Post an Update" function - if not commercial and minimalist style like your own page, I would immediately sign up there.

> like Facebook, that eventually all people will leave for something simple(r)

You'd be surprised how alive it is outside the US-American / Western European thought bubble

A few years ago I made QCard to solve the problem of quickly sharing info at meetups and conferences - It's nothing but a convenience wrapper around VCard - Everything runs in the browser.

Try it out: https://qcard.link

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