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Kris Buytaert writes:
Be prepared to answer the question, Do You Poken?, some day soon, as Poken is the new gadget in town.
Some people call it the future of social networking, others are more sceptic. Poken was created by the eponymous Swiss company who want to bridge the gap between physically meeting someone and remembering later on who it was you met. The process of searching through your social networks to find the people you met and connect to them is often repetitive and boring.
With a Poken, you simply hold two pokens together, one per person. The information passes seemlessly between them: upon plugging the updated Poken into your USB-slot, you open a webpage that lists all your new contacts with the information they want to share, which hopefully includes their contact details and links to their social network sites so you can quickly link up.
The idea of exchanging data at the click of a button - or less - has been here for ages. The problem is always that any given tool needs to gain critical mass before it becomes useful.
I remember transferring my VCard from my Palm Pilot or Handspring Visor to other people's Palm Pilot, or using different IrDA protocols to transfer my details between different phones. That worked fine for the happy few that had similar devices. These days we transfer details over SMS messages or Bluetooth, but that means they are stuck in our mobile phones - with the Palm, at least I imported them into my PIM.
The thing is, not everybody had a Palm, not everybody had a IrDa enabled phone, and people tend to turn off Bluetooth for security reasons. The idea of adding a (soon to be rebranded) TikiTag to your business card seemed cool, so far as I could hand out cards to the two people I was absolutely sure had a reader.
So different people have tried different methods to achieve the same goal, which is to exchange digital data during those times when people are in physical contact. But none of them has caught on ... yet.
At the Fosdem Beermeetup yesterday, I had the first chance to actually use the Poken, and when plugging it into my laptop, it was but seconds before I was connected with a bunch of people with direct links to their Linked-In, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook profiles, (and other sites I had never heard of). I got links to a variety of profiles, each profile having been defined by the person themselves, telling the Poken which details he/she wanted to share with the rest of the world.
Today the Poken is spreading mostly throughout Europe, and slowly making entry into the US. Some of my US friends think the Poken is too expensive, but for 10 Euros it is the perfect marketing gadget to hand out at events. I expect to see custom-styled and pre-provisioned pokens pop up in the near future.
