Technology has made our lives easier in countless ways, but managing contacts isn’t one of them. Instead, as social media platforms, smartphone operating systems, and other services proliferate, contact management becomes an ever more disjointed and inefficient process.
There’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, Google Contacts, and Outlook, to name just a few. Then there are good old fashioned business cards to deal with – or, more likely, leave in a drawer for 18 months before throwing out.
It’s an unholy mess, but a plucky startup has just come up with what looks like an extremely elegant and powerful solution.
HomePage is a new contact-management app that brings all of the flapping threads of your personal and business contact network together in one simple and efficient platform.
It all starts with a QR code. Each HomePage user has their own MyCard, containing their contact info, links to their social media accounts, their phone numbers, their home and business addresses, and so on.
And each MyCard has its own unique and permanent QR code. To share contact information, all that HomePage users need to do is scan each other’s QR codes.
The neat thing about this approach is that it’s not restricted to one-on-one contact sharing. If you want to disseminate your information more widely you can stick your code onto your promotional materials, display it on a standee at your conference booth, or whatever. No more messy, expensive, and largely useless business cards.
Once a user has a contact’s MyCard in their virtual rolodex, there’s no more maintenance. Users don’t need to worry about keeping their contact books up to date, since any changes a user makes to their contact information will automatically be visible across their network.
You can tailor the level of access your contacts have, too. While your Contacts can only see basic info, your Connections belong to something like a closed social media group where you can all share photos and post updates and all that good stuff.
On paper, HomePage seems like the ideal solution to the problem of contact fragmentation and we can’t wait to try it out in the wild.
To see it for yourself, head to Google Play or the App Store, or visit the official HomePage site at https://homepageapp.com.
