Steal this Product Idea #3: Get Together

Posted on July 18, 2010 by amit

While staying up all-night in your mom’s basement, battling magical orcs and pounding Cheetos sounds awesome to some people:

most of us would rather meet up with friends and do fun stuff in the real-world. Virtual worlds are dying. Instead, we use status updates and check-ins to show off how awesome our first lives are:

Our yacht is incredible! Has its own pool, hot tub, movie theatre, recording studio, spa/massage room, gym, (cont) http://tl.gd/2jgpcsless than a minute ago via UberTwitterParis Hilton
ParisHilton

Mobile, social, real-world games (like Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown) haven’t hit the mainstream because the “games” aren’t all that fun and the right incentives aren’t there. In other words, a mayorship and 10% off my next slurpee ain’t gonna cut it. I want a game with rewards like the NYC Key to the City project, which:

…invests regular New Yorkers or anyone else who happens by with the powers of magnanimity usually reserved for the city’s highest officeholder: to bestow a key to New York on a person of their choice, granting extraordinary access to generally off-limits parts of a no-entry-to-unauthorized-personnel kind of city….

The key… opens locks at two dozen locations in the five boroughs, from the baptistry at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan to a locker at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn to a very private and humble room (no spoilers) at the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens.

This is so awesome. I imagine an augmented reality future where life is a game, the world is your board, and the points you accumulate for having fun can be redeemed for new experiences. I’m thinking a mobile web powered version of The Game.

Gaurav Mishra and I have recently been discussing these concepts and came up with an idea he coined as gttgthr.com (Get Togther). He does a better job then I can of explaining it:

Step 1: You sign up using your Facebook ID and indicate your interest in joining different types of get-togethers: meet up for coffee, watch a movie, listen to live music, go shopping, learn how to dance etc.

Step 2: You browse through a list of awesome things to do in the city around your interests. Like Thrillist.

Step 3: You indicate that you will attend a proposed get-together, or suggest a venue for a proposed get-together, or propose a new get-together. Like Plancast.

Step 4: The system will connect you with [friends and] friends-of-friends who have also expressed an interest in attending similar get-togethers. Like Thread.

Step 5: Once a group has decided to attend a get together, they might get a surprise group deal offer from the venue. Like Living Social.

Step 6: Users can be designated hosts for venues, activities, or even cities. Like Foursquare.

After some debate we both felt that although this app had all the overhyped elements of group purchasing, game mechanics and FB/Foursquare APIs, it wasn’t “the one.”

What do you think? How can we leverage the mobile web to create fun, real world experiences? Do you know of other companies like SCVNGR and Geocaching doing cool stuff in this space?

Slides from Social Media Training Sessions

Posted on July 8, 2009 by amit

Last week I gave a few training sessions to new joinees in our company covering Social Media, Online Advertising and Analytics. From talks I’ve had with new joinees, I’ve found this information isn’t covered in college/graduate coursework. I’m planning on turning this into a longer course and teaching at one of the business schools here.

Part 1: Introduction to Social Media

View more presentations from amitklein.

Part 2: Twitter, Facebook and Social Data Portability

An Intro to Social Data Portability

Posted on June 21, 2009 by amit

Social Data Portability allows you to bring your friends, interests and relationships where ever you go across the web. For users, it means not having to create a new account on every site, and having immediate access to your network of friends. For businesses, it gives you more demographic insight into your users, as well as let you leverage the popularity of existing social networks to promote activity on your site. In this post I will discuss the strengths and differences between Facebook Connect, OpenSocial and Sign in with Twitter and show a few examples.

Facebook Connect

Simply put, Facebook Connect allows you to build a Facebook application outside of Facebook. You can integrate with Facebook’s authentication, retrieve profile information about your users, allow your users to find their friends who have “connected” with your site, as well as selectively publish actions to a user’s activity stream. Developing a Facebook Connect application requires software development chops but gives you access to Facebook’s 200m users. Digg and CNN both demonstrate different approaches to integration.

CNN
CNN offered a live video stream during Obama’s inaugration. It included a Facebook Connect application which allowed users to sign in with their Facebook credentials and participate in a live global chat.

Chattin' bout Barry

The participation numbers are staggering. According to Mashable:

1. 600,000 status updates posted through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
2. Facebook averaged 4,000 status updates per minute during the broadcast
3. 8,500 status updates were posted during the first minute of Obama’s speech
4. “Millions” of people logged into Facebook during the broadcast

These numbers would’ve never been achievable if users had to register with CNN to participate. Recently, the Whitehouse has taken a cue and announced a similar application for it’s live video events.

Digg
Digg’s Facebook Connect implementation allows you to link your Digg and Facebook accounts. Each story you digg, shows up on your activity stream (for all your friends to see). For Digg, the beneifts are immediate, more people will see that I am digging stories and click back to the site.

Signing Into Facebook Connect

Digg story on my Facebook activity feed

Facebook Connect is now also available for the iPhone. This is huge and will create a whole new world of mobile social applications.

OpenSocial

OpenSocial is similar to Facebook Connect but allows you to build applications that run in orkut, MySpace, Hi5, Friendster, Ning and Yahoo! and other 3rd party sites.

Virgin Global Row
The Virgin Global Row is a one crazy dude’s story about circling Antarctica in a boat by himself (and raising some money for charity). OpenSocial integration allows you to login, connect with other people who have joined the site, and push your actions on the site to your various social networks.

Open social options

Google Friend Connect
Google has also release a set of plug n play widgets based on OpenSocial called Google Friend Connect. Currently there are about 10 widgets available including sign-in, comments, polls, reviews, events and recommendations. This is cool because it allows anyone to quickly and easily incorporate social elements to their site (no coding required).

Sign in with Twitter

Yep, you guessed it, sign in with Twitter allows 3rd party sites to publish activity to your Twitter stream. One example of this is Spymaster (the Twitter game which equally amazed and pissed people off).

Spymaster
Spymaster is a game which allows you to go on missions, raise money, buy weapons and attack other spies (Twitter users). Success is based on how many of your followers play the game and how often you send out updates through your twitter stream. IMO the game is pretty boring although it is undeniably attracting a huge following and a really nice example of a successful viral campaign.

Bribing you to tweet about your activities

Real time spymaster activity

Conclusion

There’s a big battle over who will become the defacto social OS of the web. In the future sites/widgets/apps will be social (and location aware), the question is where your data will be sourced from. At this point Facebook is clearly in the lead, but Google has deep pockets and Twiter is making huge strides. As Facebook and Twitter launch payment platforms, the opportunity to monitize through social ads and microtransactions presents a huge opportunity. Got friends?

http://virginglobalrow.com/

Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)

Posted on May 31, 2009 by amit

The long-held myth that web companies can achieve profitability through free products, services and content solely based on advertising is fading. The diminishing rates of online ads, and the slowdown of venture capital and IPOs, has led to a realization that a sustainable business model for web companies must have multiple, diverse, revenue streams.

Over the last few months I’ve seen a growing number of companies offering alternative strategies to generating revenue.

Subscription Services / Premium Content (Blizzard, New York Times, GigaOM, Forrester)

The most straightforward revenue source is paid subscriptions. Blizzard, makers of World of Warcraft, absolutely crush it.

“if [their] 10 million subscribers were to pay the regular $14.99 month-to-month fee, then Blizzard would fill its pockets with almost $150 million every single month… that means a revenue-target of more than $1.7 billion for FY 2008.”

While many media companies have experimented with paid subscription models, very few have been able to do it successfully. The exception is research focused companies like Forrester which banks on corporates with deep pockets shelling out $700 for a 12 page report. GigaOM and TechCrunch have also recently launched similar premium research and analysis services.

The New York Times recently released it’s TimesReader 2.0 Adobe Air client. While the client offers an improved user experience, I can’t ever imagine shelling out $3.45 a week for content I can get for free. Though I would pay for their $3 iPhone app.

It’s possible that with the success of the Kindle, these paid content services will flourish in the future.

Freemium (Wetpaint, Pandora, Google Apps)

A variation on premium content services is the freemium model. Give away 80% of your service for free, and charge for heavy users who want more functionality or a better experience. Pandora, a music discovery product, recently launched a premium services which, for $36 a year, removes ads, provides higher quality streaming music and offers a desktop app. A compelling offering for their top tier of users.

Wetpaint is another company that has found success through the freemium model:

“When Ben Elowitz formed Wetpaint in 2005, it was intended to let anyone create a Web site free… Wetpaint typically offers advertisers space on a few Web sites with a few hundred thousand visitors. But last fall, many of their advertisers raised their sights to publishers with more than five million readers, Mr. Elowitz said. Rates for leftover ad space fell to 25 cents per thousand views from $1… Now, Wetpaint charges its big company customers, like HBO and Fox, a fee in exchange for providing extra services like site promotion and moderating reader forums… Smaller customers can pay to keep their sites free of ads. Wetpaint plans to add more paid services, including additional storage for big files and personalized domain names. It is also considering selling virtual goods on its sites. “

Finally Google Apps is another nice example of successfully upselling premium services. The communication and collaboration platform is free for up to 50 users, but for $50 per user per year you get access to a whole range of services including: additional storage space, email security and archiving, video sharing, phone support and access to API’s.

App Stores (Apple, Nokia, Blackberry, Google Android)

It’s tough to argue against the game-changing success of the Apple App Store. Rival companies like Google, Nokia and Blackberry have launched their own stores (the Android Market, Ovi store and Blackberry App World respectively). A cursory glance on the Blackberry store only showed about 20 apps, and none of them were paid. While they won’t be competitive with Apple (at least for some time), it’s at least showing that this model is profitable and worth pursuing. I’m sure this is now central to how mobile handset makers and software developers plan on monetizing phones.

Interestingly this model is now being extended beyond just phones (and why not!). According to the Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz:

“Vector is a network service to connect companies of all sizes and types to the roughly one billion Java users all over the world. Vector (which we’ll likely rename the Java Store), has the potential to deliver the world’s largest audience to developers and businesses leveraging Java and JavaFX.

Our runtimes reach more consumers than just about any other company on earth. That ubiquity has obvious value to search companies, but it’s also quite valuable to banks looking to sign up new accounts, sports franchises looking for new viewers, media companies and news organizations looking for new subscribers – basically, any Java developer looking to escape the browser to reach a billion or so consumers.

How will it work? Candidate applications will be submitted via a simple web site, evaluated by Sun for safety and content, then presented under free or fee terms to the broad Java audience via our update mechanism. Over time, developers will bid for position on our storefront, and the relationships won’t be exclusive (as they have been for search). As with other app stores, Sun will charge for distribution – but unlike other app stores, whose audiences are tiny, measured in the millions or tens of millions, ours will have what we estimate to be approximately a billion users. That’s clearly a lot of traffic, and will position the Java App Store as having just about the world’s largest audience. “

I believe that a paid app store is also a viable business model for social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Microtransaction (Tencent, Zygna, Facebook)

Tencent, the largest Chinese social network, focuses on microtransactions as their primary revenue source. Users pay for subscriptions, virtual clothes for your avatar, new weapons, cute pets, etc… From their ’09 first quarter results:

Internet services (digital goods, game subscriptions, micro-transactions) – $279.9 mil (76% of total revenues)
Mobile Subscriptions – $64.5 (17.6% of total revenue)
Online Advertising – $21 mil (5.9% of total revenues)

Online advertising only 5.9% of their total $350mil revenues? Impressive.

Another company successfully generating revenues from social gaming microtransactions is Zygna. According to TechCrunch:

“Zynga, the online gaming publisher, is making a ton of money… [close] to $100 million. And clearly, it’s accelerating… There looks to be a bright future in the online gaming sphere and specifically around micro-transactions. That’s how Zynga makes most of its money. With some of its leading games on MySpace and Facebook, it charges users for playing time or for things like chips in poker. These small purchases which usually amount to only a few dollars at a time, start to add up quick. And that’s only with a small percentage of overall players opting to buy them.”

Facebook finally launched it’s much anticipated payment platform for testing. Facebook hopes to be the OS for the social web. They are banking on companies like Zygna figuring out what it the masses want and developing social applications on top of their platform. App developers will be able to charge for subscriptions and create opportunities for in-app transactions. Facebook will get a cut of each transaction. Cha-ching!

Another interesting company in this space is Tipjoy, which facilitates small payments on Twitter. I haven’t seen this used effectively yet, but I imagine a micropayment based Craigslist Twitter app could be successful.

Trend Analysis (Twitter, Zensify)

It’s undeniable that Twitter has achieved massive popularity, but that doesn’t always translate to profits (see YouTube). I believe Twitter’s most effective strategy for monetization will be mining and performing trend analysis on the millions of thought bubbles created by users daily. Both companies and individuals would pay big money to answer the following questions:

What are people saying about me/my product right now?
How has the perception of my brand changed recently and in what direction is it trending?
Geographically where is my biggest, rapidly emerging and diminishing audiences?
Who are my biggest evangelists, in what demographic do they fall in, where are they located?
Who are my biggest naysayers, how can I change their perception?
What is the perception of my product vs. my competitors?
What are the trending (in both directions) topics in my industry?

On a smaller scale the new iPhone app Zensify:

“Shows the user trends within your social graph in the form of a tag cloud of key words. In other words it brings a lot more intelligence to your social graph. Suddenly, you can see a big trending topic amongst people you follow… “Wouldn’t it be cool if “trending topics” were localized to the people who are followed by the people you follow.” Well Zensify does this… And it doesn’t just do it across Twitter. It does it also does it across updates from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Delicious, Photobucket and 12seconds.”

I believe that providing a set of tools to monitor trends amongst your social graph (and public timelines), will be a huge revenue opportunity for companies looking to monetize on social and real-time.

Conclusion

When the internet was originally created the “page metaphor” mimicked the existing print industry. It followed that the way to monetize was through advertisements. As we move from pages to activity streams we’re starting to see entirely new, innovative ways to profit. We are still in the infancy of this new stream based revolution and while companies like Twitter and Facebook have achieved huge valuations no one (especially the Newspaper and Music industries) has yet figured out Monetization 2.0. Put on your thinking hats…

The Transition to Real-Time, Social Search

Posted on December 18, 2008 by amit

John Batelle recently wrote a great post about the shift from static to real-time search. To paraphrase he says that Google is/was awesome because for the first time, you could quickly and accurately get static information about any search term. Though this strength is also a flaw. By nature, newer content will have a lower page rank and thus appear farther down in search results. The emerging “liveweb” will be able to answer the question “What are people saying about X right now?” The current best example of this is Twitter Search. But this isn’t enough. The question I really want to ask (and the real moneymaker) is “What are people I trust saying about X right now?”

A few examples where static search is insufficient:

Breaking news/current events (we’ve seen many examples where Twitter breaks news stories first – i.e. San Diego Fires, Mumbai Terrorist Attacks, etc..,) Many times Twitter is able to provide (arguably) more accurate real-time reports that the news that traditional news outlets later pick up on. While Google is incorporating News Results at the top of it’s list:

It’s still not enough if I want to get a grasp on the current situation/perspective/events occurring now (though interestingly enough the NYTimes ad on the right is incorporating real-time content).

Finding the amount of times people are searching/mentioning a term – Google Trends allows you to verify the pretty obvious fact that searches for Santa tend to spike at the end of the year, but did you know Canadians were the most actively searching for Santa and that progressively each year less people are asking Google about him?

The equivalent of this is Facebook Lexicon (interestingly no label on the y-axis, not useful for an actual research tool) and Twitter Twist (been down for quite a while). This is huge for PR and Product companies who want to be able to monitor how much buzz a person/event/product are receiving.

Product Reviews / Social Shopping – When most people want to buy a product online, they head to Google. This is why advertising on search is a big moneymaker (as opposed to advertising on social networks which is seriously struggling – people go to Facebook to waste time, flirt, look at pictures of their friends drunk and write each other stupid messages, not buy products). There have been a bunch of entrants into this market but none so far has provided a compelling product and achieved critical mass. Hopefully now with Facebook Connect/Google Friend Connect, someone will make this possible. If I’m looking for a camera, I want to know which camera my friends use and love, then find the cheapest place to buy it. The first person who makes this easy to do (using my Facebook social data) is going to make a killing.

Google dominates static search, Twitter knows what you are doing, Facebook controls your social graph and Apple knows where you are. The company able to blend all of these services (static, real-time, social, and location), while maintaining the strictest privacy controls, which will dominate the next era of the web

The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report

Posted on November 29, 2008 by amit

Every year Ave A/Razorfish puts out a yearly report highlighting research and trends in digital marketing. The focus this year is on the expanding role of social apps and how people use them. Not only is the report extremely insightful and provides a glimpse of where the internet and it’s users are headed, it also is beautifully put together.

There are 13 articles including, Designing Experiences for the Facebook Generation, How Micro-Interactions are Changing the Way We Communicate Online, How Tiny Applications are Remaking the Future of the Web, A Look at Games as Tools Not Toys, and Data Visualization for the Online Era. Below are some key takeaways – this is not meant to be a complete summary, just an excerpt to give you an idea of the contents.

Meet the Connected Consumer

All signs point to the continuing disintegration of “one-stop” digital destinations… We’ve found that [consumers] don’t want a one-size-fits-all solution for their needs. Consumers prefer using multiple destinations, and then aggregating media and services, via simple tools like RSS, into a highly personalized view of their digital world.
We were most surprised to see widespread acceptance and frequent consumer usage of Web site widgets… This development reinforces our belief that distribution of content and services will trump destinations, as both consumers and Internet technologies continue to evolve. Additionally, it will provide significant challenges for publishers (primarily media and entertainment companies) who currently have no clear path towards monetizing content distribution across the Web.
Digital Behavior Defies Age: We found today’s connected consumers equally distributed across all age ranges, with a slight skew to older segments. No longer are we seeing Internet technology adoption rates limited to only certain segments. Our study found widespread acceptance of these new service offering and finds older consumers much more likely to spend money online.

Designing Experiences for the Facebook Generation

What is happening is that the concept of social networking is evolving and morphing. It’s now about making the entire Web social instead of just creating a ghetto of destination sites where people have to go to socialize (a la Facebook Connect).
People want to feel special and tend to reach out to the things that make them feel that way. So, it’s no surprise that people flock to social networks in droves; they make users feel like the star of their own lives.
The most recent rapid expansion on the Facebook and MySpace sites came when they opened up their systems and allowed developers to make applications for their sites
Design for multiple levels of participation
- Low-level: rating, poking, tagging, commenting, subscribing
- Mid-level: writing statuses, twittering, playing games, adding widgets, uploading photos
- High-level: making videos, writing blog posts and reviews
- Expert-level: moderating groups and message boards, creating applications, running feeder businesses on the social network’s “economy”

Putting Jakob Back on the Shelf

Stop launching your design activity around pages as the medium… We need to build frameworks that power both storytelling and answer-seeking to occur.
Design the new customer experience as a map of interactions. The new experience might be a conversation; it might be a series of decisions made by the user; it might be an interactive storytelling session. Understand what the customer needs, and just design that.
Let’s not limit our vision to effective Web editorial styles, properly ordered Cancel and Save buttons, and left aligned lists of mixed capitalization blue links. Let’s design customer experiences that start and end with, well, the customers’ goals and needs—and let’s start with a blank slate. Use storytelling and interaction building blocks—not the building blocks of desktop publishing.

How Micro-Interactions Are Changing the Way We Communicate Online

At the heart of micro-interactions is the belief that immediacy, simplicity, voyeurism and constant communications matter. The success of the tools lend credence to the notion that quick, possibly frivolous, short bursts of communication are just as useful as more measured, reflective communications.
Web experiences will need to support communication dynamics that allow users to engage in something and report back to their communities in a Twitter-like fashion. Because they have the portability of a social graph, these micro-interactions will take place anywhere on the Web as people interact with their friends in more locations.

How Tiny Applications Are Remaking the Future of the Web

One could argue that we are seeing a third wave of software properties—propagated by RockYou—that is differentiated from previous waves based on customization, interactivity and viral distribution.
We believe that widgets provide the purest glimpse into the new, improved networked future. It’s an interconnected world where people will select, personalize, share and consume Web services wherever and whenever they choose. Effortlessly.

A Look at Games as Tools, Not Toys

Get to know the product by imagining it as a game… Use game-inspired techniques to create a better experience in non-game products.
People love instant feedback. It creates a sense of reward through a series of small, doable steps. In games, the steps to “winning” are visually represented and easily accessible. This may look like a coin-counting meter, a halo around your avatar or many other things. Mint.com’s dashboard provides instant feedback on your financial goals. It monitors how every swipe of your card affects your budget and net worth, and even how your spending compares to others in the same city.

Data Visualization for the Online Era

The next time you are tasked with providing users with consumption or performance information, or a way of comparing the past, present and future, think of the questions the users are trying to resolve. Then get creative and provide the answers visually. Consider how quickly they can use the information to decide to buy, change, stop or reconsider. Ensure the style of the visuals reinforces a brand personality. The result? Users who will feel empowered, engaged and appreciative that you have saved them precious time and allowed them to make a decision with confidence.

In case this report isn’t enough reading for you can download last year’ report: Desigining for Constant Change.

Billion Dollar Business Idea

Posted on October 16, 2008 by amit

I have an idea, it’s a good one too. This is gonna be big, we’re talkin’ bigger then YouTube, Facebook and Cute Overload… combined. I’m goin’ to let you in on the secret, but there’s a catch – I need your help. I just need you to answer to the following question: What is the killer service that combines people’s location (g/iPhone) and existing social data (Facebook, OpenSocial) to drive real life interactions and sales? Give up? Me too…

The convergence of the mobile and social web (although over-hyped for years) presents an enormous opportunity. For a long time we’ve heard rumors of a mystical app where you specify you specify you want some new size 13, white, Nike Zoom LeBron VI’s. You walk by FootLocker and all of a sudden you receive a message letting you know they have it in stock, in your size, and if you buy it now, you get 15% off. Or the app that let’s you know the cute chick across the bar is single, and shares your love of Stan Getz and Quentin Tarentino. Perfect? Not really, privacy concerns and unwelcome solicitation can quickly ruin this product. Success with location based services (LBS) can only be achieved by giving users complete control over their privacy, and continuously building trust by providing more useful and accurate services.

I’ve spent some time playing around with the current LBS offerings Loopt and Yelp, but I think there’s a lot more that can be done. This summer I came across an article in the NYTimes describing Sense Networks. I downloaded the CitySense app on my blackberry and was floored, absolutely incredible. It allows you to see in real-time where people are, if the population density is higher or lower then normal in certain areas and recommend places you would like to go based on where you’ve been (currently only for SF).

But this is just a for-fun demonstration of their technology. Some of the tough questions that Macrosense is trying to answer include:

Where do people make the decision to go to one place versus another? Which places in the city are “influence points” versus “stops en route”?
From where do the most people come from before arriving at a particular location? Where do most people go afterwards, and how does this change throughout the day?
What is the demand and elasticity of demand for places, activities and services by income level? What are the most dramatic increases and decreases?

This is dope and extremely profitable. The information could be used for marketers and business trying to determine the right location for their store. The company is backed by hedge funds and I bet are making some scary decisions based on their findings (i.e. economy goes down 10% no one is going into the Apple Store, short the hell out of the stock)

Another great, new product is the Sekai Camera. The concept is not only awesome, but the video is highly entertaining:

As we continue to make our phones smarter with faster and ubiquitous connections and GPS, we can enhance our real world experience by utilizing the thoughts, opinions and opportunities presented by friends and strangers alike. Ideas anyone?

10^100 – Why Google still isn't Evil (yet)

Posted on September 23, 2008 by amit

While Google was making headlines today with the launch of G1, I came across another article describing their Project 10¹⁰⁰. The project is described as, “a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible.” You submit a brief description of the problem you are trying to address, your solution, and who would benefit the most. The proposals are divided into categories (i.e. Community, Energy, Health, Shelter), Google will select the best 100 and then let the public vote on the top 25. A final advisory board will select 5 winning ideas and $10m will be given to the organization in the best position to implement.

A lot of companies donate $50m to charity and organizations, but it’s awesome that Google reaches out and let’s anyone submit ideas. Recently, Google’s shine is beginning to wear. It’s fun to root for the underdog, but when the underdog is worth $135B and is dominating search and advertising, people start to get nervous. Google has a ton of cool projects that remind us that they want us to still be around when the machines take over.

My favorite part about the site though was at the end of the FAQ: “(h) Any text or speech in the video must be in one of the following languages: English, German, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Turkish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Korean, Russian, Swahili, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Arabic, Hindi, Greek, Czech, Hebrew, Danish, or Thai.” Pretty much allows anyone entry (except of course for Native Central Siberians).

Check out the (cliche) video:

Next Gen Development Languages Compared – Silverlight/Flex/Air

Posted on December 27, 2007 by amit

So while I’ve heard a lot about the next gen development languages, I haven’t really seen any in action. Here is my brief comparison with examples of each.

MS Silverlight

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in and Microsoft’s attempt at a “Flash-killer.” You code in .NET, VB, C#, IronPython or IronRuby. Though (from what I can understand), regardless of what you write in, it get’s compiled into C# that gets run in the browser.

Here is Microsofts demo site Tafiti. Pretty sweet, really a good example of a next-gen RIA. Allows you to visually manipulate and store different types of search results: Webpages, RSS, Images, News etc… I’m impressed.

Pro’s: Since this is a client-side technology, doesn’t matter what OS/Server you are running on (except Linux see Moonlight), also apparently works well cross-browser. Low adoption rates for Silverlight plugin.

Con’s: Currently plugin is heavy (around 1.5MB), still lacking some features – beta, Visual Studio.

Adobe Flex

Flash on steroids. “Like Flash, Flex creates SWF files that are rendered by Flash Player. However, Flex is primarily a developer’s tool… Flex is geared towards programmers, rather than designers. The primary Flex programming language, ActionScript 3, is object-oriented…” (Adobe – Flex 3)

Here are a couple demo sites: Dashboard – Since I’m an analytics freak, I’m really impressed by the level of detail and high-presentation value this offers. Try clicking around…

Bowling Shirts – I see great potential in this type of app for product customization, which along with Social Shopping, are the emerging trends in Ecommerce.
Adobe Kuler – cool and fun!

Pros – If you are coming from a Flash/Actionscript background, starting to develop Flex apps should be straightforward. Apparently FlexBuilder (Eclipse-based IDE), is awesome. Flash players are ubiquitous.
Cons -FlexBuilder is expensive.

Comparison Silverlight v Flex

At first glance between the examples I saw, it seemed like the one MS Silverlight app was way more powerful then what I saw out of Flex. That being said, all the other Silverlight apps I viewed were gimmicky and had nothing to differentiate them from a Flash app. Generally, it seems like developers prefer MS and designers prefer Adobe. These next gen RIA’s have both strong presentation and development requirements and it will be interesting to see how these companies will make their products usable by both user groups.

Adobe AIR

AIR “is a cross-operating system runtime that allows web developers to leverage their existing web development skills (such as Flash, Flex, HTML and JavaScript) to build and deploy web applications and content to the desktop.” (onAir)

AIR is fundamentally different from Silverlight and Flex above since you are downloading apps to your desktop and running them locally. The idea is that AIR bridges the desktop and web to get the best of both worlds. Flex, AJAX, HTML, Javascript could all be incorporated into an AIR app.

I downloaded the desktop app from: Kuler and FineTune Desktop and wasn’t really impressed. There is a version of Google Analytics for AIR which got me real excited, but didn’t work for latest version of AIR beta 3.

Pros: Seems like the potential is there to do some really interesting stuff with caching local data (SQLite db included), Visualization of data, using docs from the local filesystem.

Cons: The examples I previewed aren’t great. And with Google Gears allowing offline caching from web based apps, whats the point of AIR?

Other resources used:

http://shoutat.blogspot.com/2007/08/microsoft-silverlight-vs.html
http://blog.topholt.com/2007/12/05/ria-wars-silverlight-vs-flex/
http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/silverlight/IntroductionToSilverlight.aspx

Amit Klein

Figurin' it out…

Category Archives: Future

Steal this Product Idea #3: Get Together

Slides from Social Media Training Sessions

An Intro to Social Data Portability

Facebook Connect

OpenSocial

Sign in with Twitter

Conclusion

Advertising Is Not a Sustainable Business Model for the Web (unless you are a Search Engine)

Subscription Services / Premium Content (Blizzard, New York Times, GigaOM, Forrester)

Freemium (Wetpaint, Pandora, Google Apps)

App Stores (Apple, Nokia, Blackberry, Google Android)

Microtransaction (Tencent, Zygna, Facebook)

Trend Analysis (Twitter, Zensify)

Conclusion

The Transition to Real-Time, Social Search

The Razorfish Consumer Experience Report

Billion Dollar Business Idea

10^100 – Why Google still isn't Evil (yet)

Next Gen Development Languages Compared – Silverlight/Flex/Air