There’s a quiet revolution going on in the way information is presented on the web. Largely driven by the preferences of mobile web users, web pages of general information that link to each other are being replaced by “cards” – collections of related information about one specific thing presented in one discrete, self-contained unit. Think of them as virtual baseball trading cards, if that helps. You’ve probably seen cards on the web already; Pinterest, for example, has always been designed around cards, and Google Now has used cards for some time to deliver information to smartphones. Now Twitter delivers information as cards, too. So how can libraries use cards to deliver information? Good question, but perhaps the articles below will spark some ideas.
- Why cards are the future of the web (Inside Intercom/Paul Adams) “As social media continues to rise, and continues to fragment into many services, taking up more and more of our time, marketing dollars will inevitably follow. The consistent thread through these services, the predominant canvas for creativity, will be card based. Content consumption on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Line, you name it, is all built on the card design metaphor.”
- Twitter cards (Twitter Developers Documentation) “Twitter cards make it possible for you to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your content. Simply add a few lines of HTML to your webpages, and users who Tweet links to your content will have a ‘card’ added to the Tweet that’s visible to all of their followers.”
- Learn how to use Google Now to get info such as weather and traffic when you need it (Moto X Customer Help) “Google Now delivers customized cards, based on information from your Google services (such as locations, searches, web history, Gmails, and calendar events) and from third-party products that you allow Google to access. For example, you may get traffic reports before leaving for a dentist appointment, or receive train arrival times while waiting at the station after work. View your team’s scores on game days, or find popular restaurants when you travel.”
- Twitter, canvases and cards (Benedict Evans) “The point of ‘cards’, like the story of mobile social, is disaggregation – of the over 200m people who already had Facebook but are using WhatsApp for messages – the 100m Instagram users who prefer it to Facebook for photos, and so on, and so on. From a business point of view, this is interesting because it points to distribution and discovery. How do new products and services get passed around? How does social sharing evolve?”
Innovation fact:
Popular Science named Google Now and its “Info Cards” the Innovation of the Year for 2012.
