OnePage, founded by Warwick University alumni Oo Nwoye and Joel Gascoigne, wants to make physical business cards a thing of the past by aggregating all of your contact details online.
These can include anything from your homepage address, Skype and IM handles, to your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn profile, along with a range of other social networking accounts. There’s also the ability to embed your OnePage as a widget on your blog or website (and others can do so too), as well as the option for third-parties to email you directly through your OnePage via a contact form. Bizarrely though, the latter requires that they sign-up first, which adds far too much friction in itself and sort of defeats the point. It’s supposed to make it easy for others to get in contact after all.
Cards can be ‘collected’ – sort of the virtual equivalent of sticking those cardboard business cards in a draw – so that you can retrieve them later, and obviously any contacts details will be kept up-to-date (in theory at least) since they are dynamic. In this sense, it may be that OnePage wants to become a sort-of social network in itself, hence the insistence on making others signup to use the contact features. This would make it compete much more directly with LinkedIn or Xing, which I’m not sure is smart.
Overall, OnePage is hardly a new idea – competitors include the likes of .tel and Card.ly – and in truth, should the service gain traction, it’s likely that the first thing users will do is print off a batch of new business cards with their OnePage URL on it, making it complimentary to the traditional business card rather than a direct replacement for it. That said, it’s nicely designed and dead-easy to set up, and for those who want a simple web presence to rule them all, it is a potentially useful offering nonetheless.