Please review my app, Card Karma

by bryanlanders • 16 years ago

29 15 16 years ago

Card Karma lets you create your own free ecards using Flickr photos, Youtube videos, or any image you want via Facebook upload, bookmarklet, or URL.

You can share your cards via Twitter with a short URL (kr.ma), post them to a Facebook wall, or simply email the link. It's all free and ad-free and you don't need an account to try it.

Happy Holidays!

bryanlanders8• 16 years ago

Card Karma lets you create your own free ecards using Flickr photos, Youtube videos, or any image you want via Facebook upload, bookmarklet, or URL.

You can share your cards via Twitter with a short URL (kr.ma), post them to a Facebook wall, or simply email the link. It's all free and ad-free and you don't need an account to try it.

Happy Holidays!

ipince• 16 years ago

Pardon my ignorance, but is it ok to use images that you do not own the rights to for this?

bryanlanders8• 16 years ago

Thanks for asking. It's illegal to use images you don't own the rights to, so doing so is not allowed on Card Karma. Any images reported by users or discovered by admins to be stolen will be removed from the site (and will go missing in your cards!)

jordanvisco• 16 years ago

Love this little app. I think its ok because he only uses images with Free to Share licenses and then attributes the work to the original photographer.

ie this card http://kr.ma/h2

has an image that uses this license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en_CA

yashh• 16 years ago

Looks neat.. Mind throwing some light on the backend and technologies (db, framework) you used? I must say that it is really well designed.

bryanlanders8• 16 years ago

You bet. The stack is something like this (in no particular order): Django Postgres Memcached RabbitMQ Gunicorn Supervisord Celery Nginx Solr Ec2/EBS

I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff...but, that's most of it.

cjkundin• 16 years ago

I walked through the app, creating a custom card and sharing via email.

I think you did an EXCELLENT job walking the user through the tasks. Instead of going about it from the engineering stand point, and creating a dashboard to manage your cards (ha) you lead me through real use cases and I was able to create a card with little effort. I'm a firm believer when a user goes online they become dumber and just start clicking buttons. Again, I was lead through the app with big fun icons and steps that had bright "Next" buttons. A 5 year old could have created and shared a card, that's awesome.

I also liked how you explained the privacy setting on step 3(?). I was thinking it, and right next to the 'Next' button was my answer.

With that said, I thought there were a few pages that felt cluttered. The share page, for example. This is your viral channel and maybe the most important step (depending on your goals) so I would make this the only thing on the page (or bigger). Removing some of the content on the right and definitely at the bottom might prevent people from not doing that final, important, step.

Also, on the share page, have you thought about an email form with a pre-filled message and the link inside? We have found (slightly different use case) that most people don't even care about changing the message and having this form just reduces user friction. However, I can see the advantage of letting the user use their own email client to..

bryanlanders8• 16 years ago

Great insights. The 'make a card' steps are made to accomodate folks who have the next-next-next syndrome (i call it!), but also have more customization options for folks who want them. It's really the bulk of what you can do in the app, so I'm thrilled you dug it.

Yes, the share page is tough. My instinct is more in line with yours, but I kept getting feedback that after you shared your card there needed to be more stuff to pull you back in ("now what?!"). But, I agree, it needs more work there.

The only emails sent from the site are welcome and password reset messages and that sort. I want to really guard the brand against becoming spammy, so I've delayed sending cards via email from the site until I can get it right. In the meantime, I've been happily surprised that most people don't mind the options that are there!

Keep the ideas coming. I really appreciate your feedback.

mikesaraf• 16 years ago

A very well done site! The ability to jump in and make a card and get a shortened link without signing up and harvesting email is one of the real attractions, the other is the flickr integration, its really slick.

A possible problem is you may be violating the license to some of these images. The first few I checked out where all creative commons, but this one does not allow derivative works, but it shows up in the results: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24879866@N05/3488893875/

(I may be misinterpreting the license)

One minor thing, where it displays the images from flickr, I would make the "use" button more apparent, it doesn't look like a button so it is not clear that you can click on it.

Otherwise its a very nice site, how long did it take you to build? Technical details?

bryanlanders8• 16 years ago

Thanks for trying it out! This is the ecard site I wished existed for years...no spammy ads, and no confusing sign up where you don't really know how much it will cost, etc. The main incentive right now for creating an account is to be able to have all your cards in one place (on your profile) and be able to edit them.

Re: the Flickr images, all the images pulled in via the API are not edited, copied, or saved in any way on Card Karma. They are actually loading right from Flickr's CDNs. I've tried to get feedback from a number of Flickr photographers and a Flickr admin to make sure I'm inline with their terms, and so far it's not been a problem.

It took me forever! I went to school for Jazz Performance on the banjo, so I had to learn Django, working with AWS products, etc, as I built the app. See my comment below for more tech details.

ConceptDog• 16 years ago

Front page is NSFW with a topless chick in the bottom right.

bryanlanders8• 16 years ago

She's gone. Flickr API didn't think she was inappropriate...go figure.

I'll leave the Lady Gaga Youtube video there since every teen in the US has probably seen it already.

fezzl• 16 years ago

I'm not a fan of the unsaturated colors.

bryanlanders8• 16 years ago

It is quite light. You should have seen the first version (even lighter!) The idea is to let people's cards shine and do all the talking and have the UI be as minimal as possible. I'll keep refining as I get more feedback. Let me know if you have any ideas on what you'd like more.

Please review my app, Card Karma

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