Since my lib school orientation this past August, one thing that had been drilled by then current students and alum were business cards: Many students were hitting conferences before starting school, others were working in libraries or in information organizations or just plain networking at social events and the like. On my global to-do list, getting business cards has been hovering at the top for months now as I either keep forgetting or am too lazy to order them. Now two days before the conference, I had to whip some up together and thus, at the last minute bought business card stock and color ink and spent an hour or two designing business cards to print from home the night before. Satisfied with my handy work, I printed about 30 or so cards and neatly stacked them in my wallet.

Except — I shouldn’t have bothered. Since the entire conference was Twittering, I was connected to nearly everyone at the conference within an hour. And that’s how social networking works, in a nutshell: You find X person at one social networking site and you are almost literally connected to their entire world. Thank $deity I brought my laptop with me because not only was I adding new peeps to my follower list but also adding them via various other sites as well. Who needs business cards when you have the interwebs?

A few days later, a follow librarian tweeple twittered about Poken – essentially a tiny USB flash drive that is configured to hold all of your social network info in one spot. No more hunting and pecking through various sites, Poken is essentially your business card and connector in one easy to use application.

For someone like me, who is on every major social network, this is brilliant as I may be @pnkrcklibrarian on Twitter, but I’m academichussy on LiveJournal or modgirl on Last.Fm. I have have different user names on various sites depending on what nom de plume I was using at the time I signed up. And if you just met me, you wouldn’t, obviously, know that. But with Poken, and using various privacy settings depending on whom I’m meeting, all that guesswork is taken away.

As conferencing is looking to be more likely in the future, I will eventually order Moo cards for my business card needs, but I’ll also will have a Poken with me as well. But I’m hoping, no betting, that Poken-ing (or something similiar) will become the new de facto way of
giving people information about me, because portals are so 1999.

P.S. I once did a presentation for a small group on Jane Austen and the use of tea as a social construct in Georgian times and one thing that surprised me during my research was the use of calling cards, which were in fashion during her life time (late 18th and early 19th centuries) and had been around for quite some time before that. Calling cards are also apparently making a come-back of sorts and while I don’t think the concept is ever going to go away, the new technology will definitely improve how we convey social introductions to each other. Everying old is apparently new again.

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