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Why My Twitter Avatar is a QR Code
A few weeks ago, I changed my Twitter avatar from my smiling face, to this:
This is my QR code. Feel free to scan it.
Scott Hale asked me why I had gone with a QR code as my avatar, and we proceeded to have an interesting conversation, mostly by DM (apologies for the reverse order. Read from the bottom up).
Conversation continued….same rules apply. Again, apologies.
There are, of course, some concerns with QR codes. Specifically, it’s a pretty small demographic of people who know what to do with a QR code if they see one. I get that, and I’m OK with that. This is a new way to put my contact info in a potential client’s phone, which makes me think of it as an online business card. More creative people like Peter Cognoscenti have their’s link to an actionable online page. I’ll not ruin the surprise for you if you haven’t scanned his code yet.
As I said in the conversation with Scott, QR codes are a huge unknown currently. I think there is value in using them, especially as more and more of us use our smartphones to browse the web. For the time being, there is no universal format (think .jpg or .mp3) for a QR code, so different scanning apps have different results. That’s a problem that needs to be rectified before these can really take off.
So what about you? What value do you see in QR codes? What concerns do you have? Let’s hear it in the comments.
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