Cardbox

Cardbox

Contacts reimagined as a social network ✨

1 follower

Cardbox reimagines the address book as a social network. It’s the one central place to stay connected to the people in your life, without all the noise. No posts, no likes, no ads; just contacts. Manage only your own card, and subscribe to each other’s contact information with just one tap.
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Cardbox gallery image
Cardbox gallery image
Cardbox gallery image
Cardbox gallery image
Launch tags:iOSProductivitySocial Media
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What do you think? …

Doney den Ouden
Hey Hunters, I’m extremely excited and proud to announce my first startup: Cardbox 😁 After growing frustrated from outdated, incomplete, and duplicate contact information that had accumulated over the years, I realized that the concept of contact management has become really dated. While we’ve seen a lot of innovation in email and calendar apps, the same can’t be said about contacts apps—even though we all use contacts, and the process of contact management hasn’t changed since the first smartphones. 🦖 At the same time, the detrimental effects of social media on mental health, relationships, privacy, and politics have become quite clear, and many people want to cut down on their social media usage. The problem is that when you leave social media platforms, you also lose your social networks (note the distinction). 🚷 Then it hit me. By combining contacts and social networking, I realized most issues with both could be fixed, and in hindsight combining them just makes so much sense. Why should you manage someone else’s contact information in this age of connectivity? So I got to building. Enter Cardbox: the one central place to stay connected to the people in your life. Whether it’s family or friends, classmates or colleagues, teammates or clients; you can connect once on Cardbox and exchange the contact information necessary to stay in touch both online and offline. Cardbox turns the concept of contacts on its head; everyone manages only their own card. When you connect with someone, you subscribe to each other’s contact information. I say subscribe, because here’s the kicker: when you edit any information on your card, the changes are instantly pushed to the device address books of your connections. 📲🆒 New email or home address? No more mass BCCs to notify everyone it has changed. Text or call someone from a new or temporary phone number? They won’t even know it. Different Twitter handle or moved to another messaging app? Just edit your card. 📝 I haven’t even gone into how you can arrange your contacts list by Group; how you can limit which specific fields you share with someone at any time; how you can find people by name, link, or Nearby using Bluetooth; how you don't have to remember another password because nobody likes passwords; how dark the Dark Mode looks; and how much your privacy is valued at Cardbox. The information on your card is encrypted, and only shared with your connections—not advertisers or data brokers. Let me wrap this up with a special offer: the first 100 users who link their Product Hunt to their Cardbox card today get one free month of Pro! 💝 Other ways to get free Pro include the referral program, and the giveaway of one *year* of Pro on Twitter today. 🎁 Go claim that beautiful username while it’s still available! 🤩 Android users; I see you. I’ll be doing my very best to get Cardbox on Android this summer, so that nobody ever has to spend time on manual contact management again. I’ll be here to answer any questions and feedback in the comments. Please enjoy! –Doney
Chris Herbert
Does it import contacts from the native iOS app?
Doney den Ouden
@hrbrt Hey Chris! 👋🏼 Since Cardbox sits between a contacts app and a social network, I decided to only show your Cardbox connections in the app; this makes it clear which contacts are modern and dynamic. You can still use the native iOS app to access both Cardbox and static contacts. The idea is we all slowly move towards self-owned, read-only contacts. Hopefully it’s an incentive to invite your circles to join the new way 🙌🏼
Phil Pluckthun

The idea is simple but powerful: If you meet someone at a meetup or conference it's always fun to connect with them on social media, e.g. Twitter, but then you miss out on being able to DM them anywhere else unless you ask them what chats they use.

Pros:

- Awesome and simple design - Discover nearby people - Easy editing and nice shortcuts

Cons:

- Discovery via social media would be nice

Nelson Wells
Congrats. Will give it a whirl, but really hoping for this on a blockchain platform as we slowly take back ownership of our own data and maybe that means health data sooner than later. Thoughts?
Doney den Ouden
@nelson_wells Thanks Nelson. I'm not sure blockchain would be a solution you'd want for this, seeing how blockchains are immutable and the data you want to share differs per person. That said I fully agree that data ownership is important and that's why I have decentralization/federation on the long-term roadmap!
Antonio D'Ingiandi
My last name have an apostrophe. App doesn’t allow it!
Doney den Ouden
@daidardi What an oversight; will fix soon and let you know!
Doney den Ouden
@daidardi I've updated the backend to be less strict on names—please try again now, sorry for the inconvenience :)
Cary Black
Why the need to install a profile? Shouldn’t contacts access be sufficient?
Doney den Ouden
@caryblack Hey Cary, I totally understand the question. The profile is necessary to set up Cardbox as a CardDAV Account on iOS. This puts your contacts in a separate container, makes the contacts in it read-only, and allows Cardbox to provide instant updates through Push. With just contacts access, Cardbox would have to work within another Account like iCloud or Gmail and edit your contacts there, which is not something I wanted. If you made changes to those contacts, the changes would be overwritten by Cardbox, leading to data loss. And, no Push updates that way. Hope this clears things up!
Silicon Valley Speak
How is this different from Plaxo?
Doney den Ouden
@svspeak Just looked up Plaxo, first time I heard of it! It looks like Plaxo was a similar service focused primarily on desktop rather than mobile, but it shut down several years ago. Cardbox is iOS-only for now, but I'm looking to expand to Android and desktop in the future. Did Plaxo also offer a global search feature and easy connections through Nearby?
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