Update: If you have arrived here looking for a way for you and your co-workers to jointly send a farewell card to a leaving colleague, you may want to try GroupCard – a website that let’s you do just that. Be sure to read this post to the end first though .

This one is definitely in the declutter my mind in order to stay focused category. It was someone’s leaving do at work today and it gave me an idea for a service that would serve the following purposes:
For Someone Leaving a Company
1. You are leaving or have recently left a company so you sign up for the service and through it send a keep-in-touch invitation to your (ex) colleagues.

2. The invitation includes details of how they can stay in touch with you, e.g:
2.1. Your Contact Details (Email, Phone, IM etc)
2.2. A link to your LinkedIn Profile
2.3. A link to your Facebook Profile
2.4. Links to other social networks
2.5. A link to your lifestream feed, which may be hosted by the service and take feeds from other services like Twitter, FriendFeed, Google Reader, Disqus etc; or may simply be an external lifestream feed service.
3. Each recipient of your invitation is then prompted by the service to respond by:
3.1. Sending a sorry-you-are-leaving farewell message
3.2. Signing-up for a profile to help you keep in touch with them also.

For Someone Whose Colleague is Leaving
1. A colleague of yours is leaving soon so you use the service to invite other colleagues to each:
1.1. Write a farewell message. The collection of farewell messages will be available to the leaver for as long as they remain with the service, assuming they sign up, and may be shared with their friends etc. This is as opposed to a farewell card which usually gets thrown away as soon as the leaver has shown it to their spouse at home – if it makes it home that is.
1.2. Donate towards a gift for the leaver. Donors will have the option of donating anonymously.
1.3. Sign-up for a profile to help the leaver keep in touch with them.
2. You can then use the donated funds to purchase a gift for the leaver from one of the service’s affiliates or withdraw the funds to use elsewhere for a gift purchase. And this, along with advertising, is where the service makes money – by taking a commission from affiliate sales or charging a fee on withdrawals.
3. You send the compiled package of profiles and farewell messages to the leaver and you can optionally print off the farewell messages to present in person to the leaver, perhaps along with their gift.
What I like about this Idea
The benefits of this idea to the user are hopefully obvious but the following are a few reasons why the idea should be a success:
- It solves a specific problem. OK not a massive or daily-encountered problem, but no less significant or more occasional a problem than those solved by say birthday reminders or e-invite services, some of which are very successful. Besides, solving a problem at all puts it ahead of many of the so called web 2.0 apps being released practically on a daily basis these days.
- It is extremely viral – funnily enough, just like birthday reminders and e-invite services.
- It is sticky – generally, people like to know what/how ex-colleagues are doing, even if the interest is malicious.
- It collects potentially useful data for the user, which would hopefully make them stay on as users – e.g. their profiles, farewell messages from friends which could be used as reference material for new employers.
- It has the potential to collect potentially lucrative data for the service, third parties and its user base, e.g. which companies are losing employees to which, what is the typical career path for employees of this company – I believe LinkedIn offers these as well.
- It could well grow into a reasonably sized social/professional network in its own right.
- It has a fair chance of a good exit – e.g. being acquired by a larger company, like LinkedIn or Microsoft.
- It has a revenue model beyond advertiising – thought I’d save the best for last.

Screen Mock-ups
Below are a couple more mock-up screens for the application