Whether you’re tossing them in the trash, using them to pick poppy seeds from between your teeth, or collecting them in a desk drawer somewhere, odds are you have come across your fair share of business cards. In today’s Digital Age, these 19th century relics have managed to hold on…but for how much longer? These free tools below all act as free virtual business cards. No trees were harmed in the writing of this blog post.
Card.ly
Perhaps the most Web 2.0-looking virtual business card on our list, Card.ly gives you a single page to display all of the assets of your online presence. Register for free, validate your email address, and begin adding social networks from a dropdown menu. Simply add your user name for each Website.
Sprinkle in the personal details you want to share, a thumbnail image and any additional links/feeds and you are on your way.
A series of skins give you a chance to stand out from the crowd.
Your Card.ly can be embedded on your Website, giving visitors easy access to a slick looking group of icons that link to all of your social network activity. You may also place a snippet of code that tells visitors of your vCard.
A premium account ($25 a year or $3 a month) gives you more skin options, zero ads, the ability to use your own domain name, unlimited RSS feeds on a page and a stat counter.
hi5 manages to keep our attention lately, with all the product roll outs the social network has, geared directly towards its Game channel and virtual goods-based economy. The latest to team up with hi5 is SmallWorlds, the 3D virtual community that launched last year.
The Biggest Loser, the weight-loss reality sensation, has just wrapped up in the States. That means there will now be a two-week stretch where the show’s stars before and after photos will be inescapable. After all, doesn’t everybody love to see a life-changing journey summed up in two images?