When someone taps Save contact on your digital business card, their phone downloads a small vCard file and opens it in its own contacts app with your details already filled in. They tap save, and you are in their address book next to everyone else they know, without installing anything or typing a letter. What ends up in that entry, and how it reads a month later, depends on a few details most people never check.
What happens when they tap Save contact
A vCard is a plain text contact file, usually ending in .vcf. The version AnimaNext uses, vCard 3.0, was published by the IETF as RFC 2426 in September 1998, which is why every phone you are likely to meet can open one. The browser receives the file, hands it to the contacts app, and the contacts app shows a new contact screen with the fields populated.
On an iPhone that is the familiar new contact card with a button to create it. On Android it is the contacts app of whatever brand the phone is, so the screen looks different, but the result is the same entry.
What goes into the contact
The AnimaNext vCard is built from your public profile, and it only includes the fields you filled in. That can be:
- your full name, with family name and given name kept apart
- your company name
- your title
- your phone number, or your WhatsApp number if you only listed that
- your email address
- your website
- your location
- your bio, saved as a note
- your profile photo, as a small image inside the file
- a link back to your profile page
The photo travels inside the file rather than as a link, because the iPhone contacts app ignores a photo it would have to fetch from the web. It is scaled down so the file stays small and saves in a moment.
Your social links, company description and posts stay on the profile page itself. That is one more reason the link back to the profile is in the file: it is the way back to everything else.
A useful test is the same one that applies to paper. If you would not hand a stranger a card with it printed on, leave it off the profile, and it will not be in the file either. What belongs on a digital profile goes through the order of things in more detail.
Getting your name right, especially in Japan
Inside a vCard, the name is stored as separate parts. RFC 2426 defines them in sequence: family name, given name, additional names, honorific prefixes and suffixes. The receiving phone then decides how to show them. On an iPhone, Settings, Apps, Contacts has a Display Order option that shows first names before or after last names, and a Sort Order that files contacts by one or the other.
That has a practical consequence. Put your family name in the family name field and your given name in the given name field, even if you are used to writing them the other way around. Typing your whole name into one box, or swapping the parts to force an order, is how a contact ends up filed under the wrong letter.
Japanese names add a second question, which order to use in roman letters. Since January 1, 2020, Japanese government documents in English write Japanese names family name first, under an agreement between ministries dated October 25, 2019. Where it matters to tell the two apart, the family name goes in capitals, as in YAMADA Haruo. The same agreement asks local governments and the private sector to follow that order where they can, but plenty of people and companies still put the given name first.
Either order works, as long as your profile, your paper meishi and your email signature agree, so the person who saved you can match the entry to the card on their desk. What a digital card has to respect to work in Japan covers the rest of the etiquette around the exchange.
A saved contact does not update itself
Many people assume a saved contact keeps itself current. Once the vCard is saved, it is a copy on their phone. When you change your title or your number on your profile, the entry they saved last month stays as it was.
The card still helps here, in two ways. Tapping the card again, or opening the profile link stored in the contact, always shows the current version. And because the profile is where people check you before a meeting, a stale phone entry is less likely to cost you anything than a stale paper card in a drawer.
If your number changes, it is still worth a short message to the people you talk to often, the same as it always was.
Check it on your own phone first
Before you hand the card to anyone, tap it against your own phone, press Save contact, and look at the entry it creates. Check that the name is filed under the right letter, the number dials, the email opens a new message and the link opens your profile. Then do it once on a friend's phone from the other platform. Two minutes of checking saves the slightly awkward follow up email that starts with "I think your number in my phone is wrong."