If this works, this would be really awesome. Cards are perfect for mobile.
Curious to hear from team why they think they'll succeed in the browser market where others (eg Rockmelt) have failed spectacularly in the past.
@borker Hey Ryan, PM from Wildcard here. There have been a number of failed attempts at launching browsers in the past-- like Rockmelt, and Flock-- but those were desktop apps that attempted to enable web browsing + some other layer of functionality (mostly, social via OAuth). Wildcard is pretty different from those-- most notably, it enables browsing of cards, not web pages. There are a ton of advantages to cards, but the biggest difference is they are part of a native mobile internet-- not just the web rendered on mobile devices. More technical background in our docs: http://www.trywildcard.com/docs
TL;DR- Rockmelt tried to take existing functionality (web browsing) and tack on a new layer (social). Wildcard is enabling entirely new functionality.
@maxbulger Fair. But do you think their failure was because of a poor product? Obviously you have some VC's who think so.
In my view, browsers are basically a distribution game, and it's going to be very hard to outcompete Safari, Chrome, IE, Firefox, etc. ie Rockmelt didn't fail because it was bad, but because in the end people are tied into their browser 'ecosystem' like people are tied into OS'es on their phone.
That said, I really hope y'all do it.
Are y'all considering:
--Easier / intuitive deeplinking?
--Rendering cards to be shareable on different platforms (SMS, Twitter, FB)?
--Actionable (ie confirm reservation, buy)?
Cheers
@borker Absolutely. Cards are designed to include deeplinking, rendering across native platforms, and support for a wide range of actions. Little more background in the intro to our documentation: http://www.trywildcard.com/docs/...
Just tried a few searches on Wildcard, and it feels a lot more like a mobile-card search engine than a web browser. It's not possible to go to any URL, so I'm curious to know why it's positioned as a browser versus mobile-friendly search.
@bthdonohue well...i think first time around, browser and search engine were two distinct things, but overtime they have sort of merged into one at least from a user standpoint...you can navigate to specific brands or even cards without searching...check out directory at the bottom, or tap any icon you see in a card to get a feel...we're gonna have to do a ton of work on navigation in the app, and search is definitely going to be the most prominent way to get around, but I don't think search alone captures the idea of providing access to every card in the world...search feels like a layer of value on top of the fundamental promise/effort
@bthdonohue Thanks Brian-- valid question. EDIT: JC beat me to it :). My thoughts aren't as concise...
Couple reasons:
-Thanks to Google + Chrome, I think the browser and search have combined into a single product for most users. The average person doesn't know what the omnibar is-- they just open a Chrome or Safari window, type some stuff in, and navigate the web (which, on a mobile device, is slow and painful). So we view browser + search as inseparable from the end-user's perspective.
-In our vision of the "card internet" (where we could interact with internet content primarily through cards and native apps, rarely touching the legacy web), cards are addressble via URI. In the future, as more people start creating cards and our index grows, you'll be able to navigate more freely outside of search (feel free to publish some cards and get 'em in our app today! http://www.trywildcard.com/dev). That being said, I don't think the URL is a user-friendly feature. Hope navigation moves away from opaque address strings and towards interactive cards backed by (invisible to the end user) URI's.
Our hope for this thing is really that everyone can publish in this format, and app dev's can render this format, and we can render cards cross-app and navigate between them with deeplinks. Our browser is one discovery-focused "card client," but the possibilities for other use cases are pretty endless.
Feels like a lot of the content on Reddit would be a good candidate to be turned into cards (e.g. /r/gifs/, /r/jokes, /r/funny, these are among the most popular subreddits in the entertainment domain). This is the type of content that I would categorize as "addictive": a trigger for people to start using the app.
The presentation of the video content is a bit boring. I would like to see a video playing without sound prior to interacting with it (like Facebook does it).
There is some function/content duplication, e.g. almost every card has "Description" and "Details" buttons. It feels that the latter should be seen after expanding the description section. It applies to the "buy now" button too – no one will start the purchase without at least glancing at the description (even for a known product).
The name of the content supplier and the logo on every card is distractive and waste of space. I would consider having a "banner" on the top of the page that shows the origin of the content depending on what card is on the screen. This banner could be seen when user is scrolling down, and it could change to the navigation (that you have at the moment) when user scrolls up (like Safari minimal UI, see GIF on https://github.com/gajus/brim) This goes against your principle idea of having the card as an atomic unit of content, but at the end... user is interested most in the content, not the content supplier. Supplier is just a meta data.
Talking about waste of space: why have the "Description" button at all? Use all of the space you have for the content and make user tap the card twice to expand it.
One last thing. Navigating up and down is tiny bit boring and purpose less. Having ability to swipe the card left/right to indicate the content that you like and the content that doesn't interest you would help you to collect a lot of data about what user wants to see next.
Ok, final thing. Tags, hashtags. It would be cool if instead of broad categories for content (e.g. "Comet Landing", "YouTube Music", etc.) I could have a query-bar at the top of the page where I can enter hashtags for the content that interests me.
You've got my upvote.
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