How green is your business card?

I used to be a Palm Treo user until I dropped it once too often. Now, I'm an iPhone fanatic, but one thing I really miss from my Palm days was that great contact beaming feature that let you dispense from swapping business cards. Be honest, how many cards do you REALLY import into your electronic contact manager. Do you STILL have a card file? How many title changes ago were your current ones printed? That said, I (red-faced) just ordered some new ones of the paper variety.

I bring all this up because there's a service out of Phoenix called TextID that is positioning itself as an alternative to those stacks of printed cards that you have in your desk drawer. You create a text identification name (could be your personal name, could be your business) and associate it with certain contact information. When you meet someone new, you share that one word text ID The recipient text the ID to 555411 and, voila, the information is sent to the phone.

OK, so that's a few more steps than the Palm-beam method. AND there is the matter of HOW you give your ID to someone. I, for one, can't remember anything these days. But a novel concept nonetheless, especially for the thumb-texting happy among us.