Wildcard Browser

Card browser for the native mobile internet

2 followers

Card browser for the native mobile internet

2 followers

Web browsers

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Mobile editing apps

Launch tags:Web App•Tech

Launch Team

MightyScout

Hey guys congrats on launching. Big fan since I just saw the blog post about it months ago. After playing around with it, I'm curious how you plan to get mindshare with the product. Most products these days are stripping down and going single function and you guys are going the opposite way. I noticed on the launch page you say discover the best news, restaurants, trending, etc. I'm not sure exactly what to use the product for since there are other apps that do extremely well in those verticals. I guess what I'm ultimately trying to understand is what am I replacing with wildcard, and what would be the ideal way to think about it? I understand the push for developers but not the consumer side. Context based search is huge on mobile, so I'm glad you guys are tackling such a difficult problem!

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12yr ago

Wildcard for Android

Maker

@Anderson760 One day we'd like to replace Safari or Chrome on your phone

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12yr ago

Button

Maker

@Anderson760 Thanks Joe! Ultimately, we want users to be able to use Wildcard in place of Chrome.app or Safari.app on their mobile devices-- but we know we've got work to do to get there. But, like traditional browsers, our value add is in interacting with and discovering content. Cards (we believe) are a much better way to do that on mobile than webpages. In the future, we'll bring more value to users with browser-specific features that make sense for mobile. Mobile brings a whole new set of use cases, like context-based search, that we don't think legacy web browsers are doing a great job of enabling. Long, exciting roadmap ahead!

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12yr ago

Startup Challenge

@jordancooper, @maxbulger — congrats with the launch! Do you have any specific ideas how cards in general and Wildcard specifically can be used in education? Do you plan any integrations with educational sites and apps? Asking because we are building card-based education platform :-)

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12yr ago

Wildcard for Android

Maker

@yurylifshits @maxbulger what types of cards are in the app?

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12yr ago

Button

Maker

@jordancooper @yurylifshits Hey Yury- You can currently publish article, product, video, review or search cards into our app. These types are kind of like templates-- you can use them for any kind of content you want, including educational material! More info on card types and how to publish them is in our docs: http://www.trywildcard.com/docs

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12yr ago

Startup Challenge

@jordancooper @maxbulger Questions, quotes, cases, encouragement ("coach cards"), achievements, course/level covers.

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12yr ago

Wildcard for Android

Maker

@yurylifshits @maxbulger so I think Q&A is an example of a behavior that is prevalent enough online that it could be a fundamental card type in the schema...more application specific stuff less likely in the near term...but we'll see. definitely hit us up on our dev facing page if you want to chat through it

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12yr ago

Implementing this on our content site today. :P @maxbulger @jordancooper - What's the fastest way to submission/approval? We're generating the json endpoints now.

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12yr ago

Button

Maker

@maxisnow That's awesome! You can use our validator tool (http://pair.trywildcard.com/card...) and submit through that interface, or drop me a line: max at trywildcard dot com.

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12yr ago

Contra

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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12yr ago

Wildcard for Android

Maker

@kuizinas thanks for all the substantive comments. we'll review in detail...appreciate you spending so much time digging in

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12yr ago

Lex

Really interesting concept! I'd love to see more design customization in the future. Not exactly sure how the concept of cards would work with that, but I think one of the important things about the web is that you can have a branded presence. How are y'all thinking about this?

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12yr ago

Button

Maker

@nbashaw Something we think about a lot-- customization and unique design is a hugely important part of any content format, especially one we hope a bunch of independent makers and developers will adopt. Cards have "types," but those just dictate the data and actions they support (see more here http://www.trywildcard.com/docs/...). Independent developers can choose to design that data into a native template however they want. For example, Wildcard article cards, Twitter article cards (or Summary with Large Image used for articles), and Pinterest Article rich pins (cards), all look pretty different, but are backed by the same data.

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12yr ago

Money Over People

Have enjoyed playing around with the product, it's really beautiful. Congrats to the entire team on launching. At this point does Wildcard take any cut of commerce that takes place within the app, or is the plan for that to come later?

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12yr ago

Wildcard for Android

Maker

@kunaltandon thanks Kunal. we don't now and never plan to take a cut of commerce

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12yr ago

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.

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12yr ago

Button

Maker

@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.

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12yr ago

@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

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12yr ago

Button

Maker

@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/...

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12yr ago

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