This article was making the rounds last week. While sensationalistic, I think it’s justified and a well-written article. Definitely food for thought. The counter-point to this article is that Flash may be in our iPhone’s future. As we all know, things currently suck.
The iPhone Threat to Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Real, BREW, Symbian
Via Steven Sacks.
Apparently the “enabling” of Flash is as simple as clicking a button, correcting my original coverage.
Check out I2Fly’s coverage of iGiki.com’s iPhone Flash Games. Also, some of Gary’s ported Flash games worked.
Ooooook, a big wtf yet again. Was on-site with a client today gathering requirements for a video player. While we provide a wide-variety of players, the ad integration I was educated on in-meeting. Apparently before I got on board, the Flash Engineers before me had gotten bloody noses learning about and implementing an in-player solution for ads for Flash via Lightingcast.
To give context, there is 3 main points people who have video content they wish to put online with an ad supported model care about:
With Google Ads and text content, this stuff is easy. You copy and paste your Google Ads on a page, and it does it’s thing. You can even define channels to help organize your aggregated ad data, and block specific areas, whether by blocking specific competitors or by simply not including code in your client pages.
Video, not so much. First, video has no context. It’s a binary block of data, and a lot of it. I’ve read sparse blog entries over the past few years discussing various companies using various technologies to get better context on video. They are doing some similar things with images and audio as well. There are 2 approaches to this. The first involves using various algorithms to gain context from the data. For example, a lot of camera’s have technology that can identify a face in the picture. This helps a lot with auto focus. Similar technology with video is used today in stores to identify customers who are “confused” and thus need an on the floor employee to help them find what they are looking for (say Best Buy). They do this by the video camera’s reading the customer’s posture in the aisles. This technology can be used by advertising companies in a latent form to gain context from a video and deliver more relevant ads without the help from text on the page surrounding the video as a context-crutch.
The second way is user-organized content in the form of user created metadata and “tags”. Assuming this data is in fact valid, you gain not just qualitative data about a video which is much more valuable to serving ads than the quantitative “it’s a video with a car in it”. The added benefit is that you gain the different perceptions of the video’s type. People tag videos in different ways. This combination of data is powerful.
That’s how you get relevant ads for video now and it’ll improve in the future. The “show some ads for only some videos” is usually handled via the CMS in charge of displaying the content on the webpage. The metrics depend on which player you are using and which ad service you are using, and at what degree.
What boggles my mind is that I’ve been told there are NO API or SDK’s out there. I’m awaiting an email from a co-worker about info that is under NDA from some unnamed company that may have an API that he’s already seen. Apparently they had an SDK available for client, in browser technologies, but it didn’t have docs explaining how to get the ads according to my co-worker. Bottom line, most people currently use Google Ads next to their Flex apps, or for players rely on surrounding HTML content. For pre-roll / mid / post-roll video ads, that’s an f’ing joke. Furthermore, the ad companies (Doubleclick Motif, Eyespot , etc.) nickle and dime you to death on even getting metrics. You could build your own player obviously to capture your own metrics, but then said player isn’t integrated with their ad data. Chicken and egg problem.
I bitched at Ted Patrick from Adobe over dinner when I was in San Fran about metrics, but I think now it’s at about the same level of market need as SCORM and other LMS integration is. Most people just use the lame ass API’s that make no sense, are all different, and code their own bridge in Flash / Flex to talk to these weird JavaScript API’s. Ted was like, “Well, if you want to build your own, just add an event listener to SystemManager in Flex with an uber high priority”. Paraphrasing, but good idea.
Anyway, anyone know of an ad service that allows you to integrate ads with Flash / Flex through an API, including videos? Furthermore, this ad data can be controlled just like most ads can via targeted categories and content? Icing would be we could associate said data with our own metrics, even if it required custom coding. Till then, I’m awaiting this SDK email from co-worker, hoping it’s been improved since he originally saw it…
I am not interested in developing for AIR, Adobe Integrated Runtime. While the features sound compelling, they do not offer me anything I need in my day to day development for clients. I do not believe the market, currently, has a supporting model for those types of applications in a compelling way. AIR additionally does not offer anything new beyond it being a Flash projector wrapper with Adobe’s name behind it. All of the features I’ve seen can be done, and have been capable of being done for over 5 years now. I believe the only reason there is a perceived vested interest by the community currently has to do in part with Adobe’s immense marketing initiatives, and part because all the new Flex blood has no idea of the history Flash already had doing this stuff.
I consider Flash and Flex really fun tools to make a living. I used to love doing desktop multimedia using Director, embedded Flash into Visual Basic & C, and even all of the 3rd party projectors (mProjector, Zinc, Screenweaver, etc.). The market, however, has been paying me since 2002 to build for the web. I know of 1 guy up in Detroit, Michigan who does nothing but desktop development doing Flash & Zinc. That’s pretty crazy when you look at all the wonderful things Flash can do being embedded into these various environments. They never got mainstream, even with all the cool things they can do. AIR is not fated to repeat this same history. Regardless, I fail to see how a big brand name with more cheddah’ than Macromedia, and newly christened Java-turned-Flex Developers can do what Director MX, Zinc, and mProjector couldn’t; get enterprise customers paying for Flash on the desktop.
All the main features of knowing when you are online or off, saving local data into either text files or mini-database engines, and running cross platform was capable of being done for years in Director, mProjector, and Zinc. Clients still didn’t pay for it. Yes, AIR DOES have transparency on an embedded browser, but that is not going to score me more work.
While I think Google Gears has potential because it actually positively affects my daily life as a consumer, I don’t yet see how AIR will. For example, if I could read my GMail and Google Docs while I’m on a plane with snakes travelling to client sites, that’d be wonderful! Until Delta gets wireless like other airlines, I’m offline when I’m at 30,000 ft. I’m no longer capable of using all the web apps I use up there. There is a real need to satisfy the occasional connectivity problem by having the ability for all of these web apps to work when offline. It’s hard to really gauge interest from the wider web development community when reading the echo chamber. Furthermore, Google Gears clearly shows Google is solving it themselves. Yeah, I know, Kevin Lynch being there might not be coincidence, but if you were Google, what would you do?
Bottom line, there are 2 sources of revenue that clients who hire me have. Either it comes from advertising, or they have an existing business model, and want me to build software to help them make more in that market. The former will use my content amidst other web content, aka adverts of some sort. The latter loves the deployment model of the web, and uses my applications on their intranets or internal websites to deploy to their customers.
So, the money fueling my Flash & Flex work right now is web based advertising models, and in using web based software applications to reduce overhead / increase customer retention & draw. People use web browsers to do both of the above, and so do consumers. They all have Flash Player 9 installed, or don’t mind installing it in the 12 seconds it takes on slow DSL . To this day, server admins still perceive Flash Player as a harmless animation toy and this works in my favor in getting them to install it corporation wide.
The only monkey wrench in the above is an un-substantiated (aka un-cited source because I don’t believe the info yet) report about click through rates. I’ve heard that click-through rates (meaning the percentage of people who see an ad AND click it) are EXTREMELY higher for widgets. While I don’t believe that strictly on the fact I’ve not been shown any official data, there is certainly evidence of it. For example, I’ve gotten 2 contract gig offers to do widget work, 1 from an agency, and 1 from a smaller software shop. The trend the past few years has been moving to bigger apps, not smaller ones, so this is odd… and using Flex, not Flash, to do them to boot. Third, the explosion of widget engines in the past 4 years. Kapsules, Konfabulator & Mac OSX’ built in stuff, Windows Vista’s sidebar, SpringWidgets, and Yourminis … and the 10 billion I’m not documenting here. It’s taking me 6 months to really try the ones that came with my Mac. Could I live without them? Sure, but do I want to? No, I’d prefer to keep them, and have access to them. Finally, the weird MySpace drama where they blocked a widget embedded on MySpaces user pages because it had it’s own ads, thus “stealing” MySpace’s ad revenue… and then subsequently buying them a week later since the company obviously knew how to make more money from MySpace’s users than they did. They wouldn’t do that if they weren’t concerned about losing money, enough to inconvenience users.
Either way, the only thing that could top the AIRBus travelling the country is if they did what Microsoft did and pay someone to build your existing, and proven to already work but let’s risk breaking it, in an unproven and new technology. Aka Yahoo building their
Don’t get me wrong, Meebo is cool and all, and I’ve used it from time to time, but there is a reason some of this stuff is out the browser. Those reasons are usually to use powerful code not included in enough browsers to depend on it. Waiting on AIR to implement said useful code means waiting years for it to come to fruition assuming AIR survives to version 2. I don’t know about you, but I like building stuff today, and in the next 6 months, and I fail to see incentives to do so. Yes, I’m aware of the various initiatives to allow talking to the OS via installed local socket programs to allow AIR apps more functionality, and while neat, it’s a hack, building something into AIR that is notnatively there.
Don’t get me started on how easy it is to write destructive viruses using AIR and how Adobe’s brand will be held accountable.
Same thing with ubiquity. Flash Player 9 is reported to be at 80% now. In a few months, we’ll have AIR v1 at 0%. What incentives do consumers have to download a large runtime to install your app? What does this to do to adoption rates which in turn affect development initiatives?
What about multiple computers? GMail works on any box with an internet connection. For AIR apps, however, the runtime has to be installed as does the app yet again on the target machine you wish to use. Furthermore, this assumes you have admin privaledges on the box. In all fairness, so does Flash Player. Finally, your data is probably saved locally unless the developer(s) of the AIR app made a way for it to be saved on a server. If not, your data is on that other machine as well.
People have spent a lot of money putting their brand online. Those people hire me to help that brand continue making money… online… and in a web browser. An unnamed company was quoted as saying, “…applications connected online that have the benefit of the desktop”. I can do that right now, and last year, and the year before that. It’s just that now, we have a bad ass runtime, and even more awesome tools that are still young, and have yet to be fully integrated. Combine that with a new breed of experienced programmers coming to the party. Just imagine a few years more when Adobe starts getting some competition (yes, I’ll keep praying for this dream, and just act delusional till then). Maybe that’s the tipping point?
It’s not so much that I wouldn’t enjoy doing development using AIR, but rather, I see it as an extreme niche, and one that there isn’t a lot of opportunity for people like me in. Can AIR do more than a browser? Sure. Will some consumers use AIR in tandem with their browser? Sure. Even so, I highly doubt the mid-size to Enterprise sphere will invest heavily in it. Getting “Flash Player 9” deployed on internal company networks is one thing, getting an app deployed, and then later updated potentially multiple times is another thing. While I love getting experience through hardship, after hearing the horror stories (DLL hell, etc.) I don’t really regret missing the desktop revolution.
As a Flex and Flash developer who drank the Central kool-aid to an Evangelist degree, I can clearly say I am not interested in developing for AIR.