Unicast

I’ve been reading a lot about social media recently, and just found an excellent presentation by Paul Adams, a Sr. User Experience researcher at Google, that takes a look at real life social networks and compares them to online social networks. It highlights just how much the current online social networking experience falls short of what we expect based on our real world interactions.

His main point is that current social networks mistakenly dump everyone you know into a giant bucket, called “friends”, and that this is completely unlike anyone’s social network in the real world. Not only is this as ill-advised as inviting everyone you know (work friends, drinking buddies, girlfriends and ex-girlfriends) to a single party, but it’s also wrong in that most people in most people’s networks would not even be described by them as friends – many are co-workers, alumni of the same high school etc. Nevertheless this is where we are today. The workaround for this situation is to take on the onerous work of maintaining separate identities online. The non-workaround is to say the-hell-with-it, and realize after you’ve spent a year fruitlessly looking for work that you still have an album of photos in your Facebook account of you throwing up on other people at parties.

There are of course a lot of cantankerous old people and conspiracy theorists (I’m looking at you Maya) who realize this model is pretty messed up, which is why four NYU students were able to raise $200,000 in funding on KickStarter to start building a new social network that would give users control of their own personal information rather than hosting it on a 3rd party like Facebook, or broadcasting it to the entire world like Twitter.

But I think businesses should be equally concerned with rushing into advertising and marketing in the messy and relatively untargeted world of current social networks and on the Internet at large, and should also be throwing some of their weight behind a better alternative. Companies may have the same or greater difficulties maintaining separate identities for their products online, especially if they appeal to different and perhaps conflicting market segments.

And, as Paul points out in his presentation, recommendations from “strong ties” are an order of magnitude more effective than those from people who are further removed. Marketing via social networks today is perhaps closer to leveraging the circle of trust, but there is a whole new level to take it to which will benefit both consumers and businesses. Everyone down from the Unilevers and P&G’s of the world should be considering (and possibly investing in) new models that protect individual privacy and support real relationships over click-to-friend relationships. The days of 10,000 “friends” are numbered.

I highly recommend reading the entire Paul Adams presentation if you have any interest in such things (which is likely if you’ve read this far): http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2

Both of the images below are from the presentation.

So, if you haven't yet read Steve Jobs official and lengthy dismissal of Flash as "the past", here are his Thoughts on Flash.

Since they have been dissected here and there by all kinds of tech pundits, many coming down on one side or the other, I won't bother with examining the individual points of the essay, or discussing who is "right" and who is "wrong".

I think it's more interesting to look at what one might be able to tell by reading between the lines.

#1 - Apple is prepared to dump Adobe

The first thing we can infer is that Apple is apparently not afraid of any repercussions by Adobe, and doesn't mind throwing whatever partnership was in place into possible jeopardy, including Adobe's development of software for the Mac.

What that says to me is that Apple believes it can (or will) replace all of that software, and/or that a lot of it will cease to be relevant within the next 18 months or maybe a bit longer. I say 18 months because that's generally Adobe's development cycle for their suites, and interestingly enough this announcement is timed just as the release of CS5, the latest (and first fully Cocoa-ported) version, is about to become available. This could be because Apple does in fact intend to replace the key components of what Adobe offers, or that they think the whole OS landscape will change enough to make software like Adobe's irrelevant, or that they just don't think it is that valuable compared to what other developers can offer - or a combination of all three.

Apple already has video editing covered, and Aperture covers a lot of the functionality of Photoshop. As I mentioned in an earlier article, I think there's a good chance we could see Apple produce an HTML5 authoring application, which would overlap with Flash and perhaps Dreamweaver as well. That would leave Apple with only Illustrator to replace.

Or, let's say Apple believes strongly enough that the world is going mobile and multi-touch that they are planning to shift their whole OS effort in that direction. Maybe they are in a position where all of Adobe's current software will then be obsolete if not rewritten by Adobe. And maybe Adobe has already made it clear they have no intention of porting to keep up with another Apple OS transition.

OR, let's say Apple has just looked around at the software landscape and would just as soon nurse some promising new software into dominance as continue to deal with Adobe - Pixelmator over Photoshop, Lineform over Illustrator, and Coda, Espresso or Flux over Dreamweaver. At some point it would seem that a full rewrite/rethink is in order by Adobe. Maybe in Steve Jobs' opinion, that point has been reached.

#2 - Apple wants Flash gone off more than just its own mobile platforms

The second thing we can take from the letter is that Apple apparently has a vested interest in undermining Flash, not just keeping it off their platforms. I don't remember Steve Jobs writing an open letter about why floppy discs were no good. Apple just decided to go without it and moved on. The open letter means Apple wants it gone, not just unsupported on their mobile platforms.

As I've mentioned before, I believe this is about control of the video marketplace, not about the OS, although ultimately video may be enough of a part of the OS experience that this is splitting hairs. If content publishers everywhere are streaming their video using Flash, then Apple, and others, will be forced to deal with Flash. There have been signs aplenty that Apple may have something big up its sleeve related to video (front and back cameras on iphone, giant server farm in North Carolina, etc), and I believe whatever it is will probably go off a lot smoother if Flash is not the defacto means of video consumption for consumers.

#3 - There's something we don't know

The third item we can assume based on the letter is that something has to have gone on behind the scenes here between Apple and Adobe that is not public knowledge at this point. It may be just that a combination of Apple treading on Adobe's feet with Aperture and Final Cut Pro finally got to Adobe, or that Apple asked Adobe to yet again make a change to whatever OS shift they have planned next and Adobe said no. It's very hard to believe that this shot was fired out of the blue, as Adobe would have us believe.

Adobe at one point was surprisingly forthright with sharing a vision of the future in which Flash ran on every device and made the OS irrelevant. The mobile market was key to this strategy. With Microsoft also recently coming down on Apple's side, it seems perhaps both major OS makers have finally decided to cut Flash off at the knees. While I think Adobe will and should fight against this, I hope they don't completely bet the farm on Flash at this point. Adobe should have a strong future with or without Flash - hopefully they are not so hell-bent on world domination via Flash that they let their core strength of making tools for designers and other content creators wither. Regardless of what is going on with Apple, I think Adobe is at an inflection point where they may need to choose which is more important - Adobe's future as an OS challenger and enterprise software provider (embodied in initiatives like Flash as a platform, Acrobat and Omniture), or its future as the pre-eminent maker of design tools.

Follow Michael Tuminello, Director of Product for Unicast on Twitter @mtumi

Now that Adobe has officially retired from trying to make Flash an authoring application for iPhone apps, many may be thinking the scuffle is over. However, I'd say it's FAR from over, and in fact I think there is a good chance that this is just the opening salvo by Apple, who plans to carve out yet another piece of Adobe's space in the marketplace for creative content authoring, as it has already done with Final Cut Pro and Aperture. This time it will be web design, and will be more akin to Flash than Dreamweaver.

Here's why I think there's a good chance we could see an app from Apple to author HTML5 content that ends up being competitive with Flash.

1. They own enough of the necessary technology pieces to make this happen. They have Motion, Dashcode, iWeb, and iDVD, which all intersect with Flash in some sense and the pieces could be put together to make a pretty nice HTML5 authoring tool for building ads and certain kinds of websites. They're not going to actually smush all these apps together, but they can take what they know from having developed or worked on each of these and leverage it to make a professional tool that includes the necessary functionality.

2. There is a pro version of all of the iLife apps now EXCEPT iWeb. iPhoto has Aperture, iMovie has Final Cut Pro, and Garageband has Logic. iDVD also has nothing, but iDVD is no longer featured prominently on the iLife page, no doubt because in a few years iDVD may as well be i8TrackTape for all the relevance it will have to the marketplace. Having a professional web tool will round out their suite of professional apps for content creation, and provide a path from consumer to prosumer and beyond with each one of the iLife applications.

3. There are no tools (that I know of at least) to author equivalent experiences to Flash using HTML5. Whatever Apple's reasons to focus on expunging Flash from their platforms, the movement will not happen without at least one serious creative tool that allows users to create similar experiences. (Why they want Flash to go away is a story for another post, and there have been a lot - the most credible posts IMO are linked to at the bottom of this article.)

4. Apple has said that they will initially handle all ad production for iAd, and then open it up. What will drive this switchover to agencies producing the kind of "engaging and emotive" content Steve Job deems worthy of advertising on the iPhone and iPad? A burning interest in learning to code HTML5 amongst the international art director set? I think not - probably a tool provided by Apple.

4 1/2. This is half a reason because I'm unconvinced that Apple cares about the format at all, but if the iTunes LP is to live on, it desperately needs an authoring tool.(Speculation has been that it was a bone thrown to labels worried about single sales replacing album sales, and the fact that it does not seem to work at all on the iPad certainly lends some credence to it not being the apple of Apple's eye.)

5. For a company that wants to own the creative professional market, as Apple seems to want to, they can only leave out the web for so long. For professional photographers, filmmakers and music producers (and those who aspire to be these people), the web is more and more the key means to present their work, and an export to iWeb will not cut it - not to mention all the web designers and interactive designers making brand new creative content for the web.

There are probably a few other reasons people could come up with. The market is hardly unassailable. There are a few monolithic web development applications that are growing long in the tooth, and a number of promising smaller applications that handle some aspect of web development well, and have a long list of additions forthcoming, with limited resources to get there. None of them are likely to have full support for HTML5 at the top of the list, and Adobe, the most likely contender to be able to build something substantial, has a vested interest in not doing so, for fear of helping to upset the Flash egg-cart.

So, I would not be at all surprised to see Apple introducing a new creative tool by the end of the year, outputting HTML5 and JS, including support for animation, vector graphics using the canvas tag, and certainly video. They will build it just in time to start to transition out of the ad building business themselves (which could be a beta period for the tool) and provide agencies with the means to stop building content for Flash, to follow up on the reasons for doing so they have already begun to circulate.

After all, if they're not going to build it, I'm not sure who is, and if no one builds it then Flash isn't going anywhere.

PS: Addendum - the two reasons I think are the most likely behind Apple's Flash-hating: preventing Adobe from owning the video market, and preventing Adobe from locking down their iPhone/iPad platform by generating too large a percentage of the content . There are also some merits to the it-performs-badly-on-Mac argument about the Flash player, but I think Apple has been too vehement for that to be the only issue.

PPS: I'm sure they will give it a better name than iWeb Pro.

Follow Michael Tuminello, Director of Product for Unicast on Twitter @mtumi

I am a former Apple employee who adores pretty much everything that they come up with (although I am still trying to wrap my head around why I’d ever need an iPad). I remember the sheer glee of unwrapping my new MacBook Pro a few years ago and the little flutter I felt when I sat in that darkened auditorium and listened to Steve Jobs tell me about his fancy new phone. I immediately wanted it. I drool over hardware specs and software alike. I got my husband switched over and he’s never been happier. It’s safe to say, I am a Mac.

But I also love Adobe. I cannot wait to get my hands on the Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5. Flash has changed my world entirely because now I can make things MOVE! Heck, the word “Flash” is in my job description. I use AfterEffects for video editing almost every day. Adobe has made products that have changed industries, and I think they’re geniuses.

But there’s conflict! Adobe’s Flash versus the Steve Jobs-backed HTML5: who will win this epic battle? Is this battle even epic? Message boards are lighting up with the debate.

I don’t know how it’s all going to end up, but I would like to speak on behalf of creative types like myself who hold both companies and their products in very high esteem when I say: work together!

Can you imagine how great it would be to have you two powerhouses on the same side of the fence? Why do battle when you could join forces and use your powers for the good of the creative types that you’ve embraced so much and who have embraced you right back? Why do we have to choose between just one way of doing things when the modern digital age offers nothing but options and alternatives? Why couldn’t we take what’s best about HTML5 and Flash and merge them together to create some impressive new hybrid version that would make both companies money? Something that would run on iPhones and iPads as well as Droids and Nexuses (Nexi?) and plain old web pages without battery vampirism, slow performance, or huge overhead! Something with a nice UI that works with both sides of the developer/designer brain! Imagine the possibilities when you take competing efforts and turn them towards a common goal. Instead of one side winning, one side losing and the rest of us having to pick sides, everyone wins, most of all us creative types.

So Apple and Adobe, let me know if you’re interested-I’m happy to mediate!

Every few months a new app appears on the market, word spreads and before you know it, everyone is on the buzz. "Topsee" is one such app. A fun and simple way to find “a mixture of things to eat, drink, see, do and buy in central London”. Lastminute.com (the engineers behind "Topsee") has decided to eliminate the idea of "user search"… That’s right, no more searching!! They have released an iPhone app which shows the user all bars, clubs, restaurant within close proximity without the user having to search for them. As the online world is driven by this function, this is a remarkable turnaround on the concept. Users no longer decide what to look for but instead are given a selection.

We all rely on trawling through the pages of our preferred search engines to show us the freshest, newest and best places to go to, eat and explore, but now we can have others do this for us: Introducing the world of “no user search”.

So, the search options have been scrapped; does eliminating search really work??

For me the idea works as it provides places to go to almost instantly, eliminating the issue of finding and choosing new places on the fly which is great. The user interface helps push the concept further; rather than numerous lists, there are simple graphical images that show the user the distance from their current location to the specifically chosen venue. At any given time, there are only ever 9 images of possible options – chosen by top bloggers in and around central London. Thus, the user will not be overwhelmed with choices and an alternative selection to choose from can be bought up by simply shaking your handset. It is also proven “the more options available, the less chance of a user choosing” this app reduces the risk of the user becoming fed-up and giving up on finding a place, but enthuses the user with immediate options.

The engineers have not only thought about the single user, but have considered the media crazy society we live in. With mobile and social networking being the most popular tools for communication the creators of “Topsee” have incorporated this factor with communicative sharing tools for twitter, facebook & email users.

I am certain, if this app proves to be a success advertisers will begin to pay a fee in order for their venue to be on the top of the list of the first options users see, as they do on Google in the online world. However, I do believe expert bloggers will still have a major input as this is the integral concept of the app.

We've all been in the situation of last minute client visits or over running meetings that calls for post drinks or dinner and this app is great for looking savvy with the best places at the touch of a button.

Learn More about the Topsee App: http://www.lastminute.com/site/labs/topsee.html

Apple’s most recent acquisition of Quattro is a bit of a puzzler. While they can’t be discounted entirely, the only two explanations I have heard for it so far aren’t convincing.

Explanation #1: Apple is doing it to compete with Google (NY Times - "Aiming at Google, Apple Buys Quattro Wireless, an Ad Company")

Why not: Apple under Steve Jobs has not gotten to be the “company of the decade” by being reactionary.

While it makes sense to tap into advertising as an additional source of revenue, both to fund its own growth and to deprive its rival of income, it’s unlike Apple to enter a new product space as a me-too move. Apple has resisted building a competitor for Microsoft Office for some 20-odd years - iWork was developed because office software is an integral part of the average user’s computer experience, not to unseat MS Office. Apple needed to build it so Mac users would not have to suffer through an un-Mac-like experience with common computing tasks. They also sat out of the MP3 player market for years until they were able to leverage the integration between Apple hardware and software to drastically improve the user experience people had with MP3 players, and then did the same with the cell phone. For Apple, it’s all about the product.

Explanation #2: Apple is doing it to make more money from the iPhone platform (Business Insider - "Why Apple Bought Quattro Wireless And Is Getting Into Advertising")

Why not: Apple will make plenty of money from the iPhone already - they're not going to compromise the user experience just to make extra cash.

This article says that because free apps are downloaded 9 times more than paid apps, Apple "wants to think about ways it can make money off free apps". If that were the case, why not just make all free apps cost something? Sounds like a sure-fire solution to me. I don't know how much money Apple can expect to make off advertising, but considering it's usually fractions of a penny per impression, and many downloaded apps are rarely used, Apple could probably make more money charging less than 10 cents for each free app then they would by trying to monetize apps with advertising. Also, by promoting (or requiring) advertising in free apps, Apple would be actively undermining the user experience for their most downloaded apps. Sounds not at all like Apple to me.

To have a better guess at the answer, I think you have to assume that Apple is building a product where advertising is integral to what the product is delivering - meaning Apple is working on a product that could not achieve its required level of elegance without Apple having a direct hand in how advertising works on the device.

I can think of two industries where advertising is completely entrenched that would be appealing to Apple, and a third on the horizon that concerns Apple as well. The first is the magazine and newspaper publishing industry. The second is the network television industry. The third is the online application space, specifically online office software (Google Docs/Office 2010 Web Applications/etc).

Once the phone gets a little bigger, it becomes a good candidate to replace a magazine or newspaper, and when it gets bigger than that, it's a good candidate to replace your TV. The operating systems being developed for phones today stand a good chance of evolving into the next general purpose OS’s, leaving the computer as-we-know-it relegated to specialized tasks that require you to deal with the complexity of a desktop OS. A company that can stake a strong claim in the new methods of broadcasting and publishing that are being hashed out to reach the mobile marketplace has a good shot at the holy grail of living room media convergence that we've been hearing about for 10+ years: phone, TV, computer, gaming system, stereo, etc. Now THAT sounds like Apple, and that's the foothold Apple is fighting for here, not for the privilege of showing banner ads on a 480x320 screen.

Who doesn't like going to the movies? Looking at some of the recent box office receipts and I’d guess that most of us still do in spite of the current economic state. While 2009 was a good year for the movie-making business, some faired much better than others.

Consider The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Summit Entertainment’s story of romance and the supernatural world between mortals and vampires. Clearly the top movie for 2009 grossing $255 million so far in the U.S. and setting records for the largest one-day gross of $73 million.

But with only average consumer and critic reviews, how did New Moon become the number one movie worldwide?

One factor to consider is Summit’s big online advertising push in the weeks leading up to the opening weekend. Clearly, Summit chose the right publishers, such as MySpace, to get their brand in front of the targeted audience. But in addition to their compelling, interactive content and HD video content, Summit went further.

According to online movie ticket outlets such as Fandango and MovieTickets.com, New Moon broke all previous records to become the top-selling pre-release movie of all time. To help make this such an accomplishment, Summit and MySpace partnered with Unicast to add in their latest feature called Movie Finder.

Unicast’s Movie Finder made it very easy and convenient for viewers of the New Moon ad to find and choose nearby theatres. All done within the ad unit, users were offered nearby theatres to choose from and then they could purchase their tickets online—even before the movie opened. No waiting in lines and it guaranteed fans entry into the first showings.

See for yourself how it works. | Ad Demo

The merger between Adobe and Omniture has recently closed. Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe, calls the merger “a game changer for Adobe and its customers” and additionally says:

“Adobe’s Creative Suite products and Flash platform help customers create and deliver engaging experiences. The addition of Omniture’s online marketing suite will help customers measure, analyze and optimize the impact and value of those experiences creating a continuous feedback loop.”

Here’s a nice graph simply depicting the value proposition:

Based on this diagram, one could conclude that the technology resulting from the merger will assist the creation and delivery of internet advertising only in an information-providing role, allowing ad creators and traffickers to make changes based on incoming data from the new reporting arm of Adobe.

It can’t help but raise a few questions, however. How does Adobe make it easy for advertising agencies to make their content communicate effectively with the Omniture platform without changing the content authoring process? How does Adobe optimize the delivery process based on real-time data (becoming more of the norm every day) without sticking their nose into the delivery process in some way? And how do they do either without stepping on the toes of a number of partners invested in advertising content creation and delivery?

Adobe is at somewhat of a crossroads. One of their core competencies to date, making tools for creative content developers, is under siege from a few different directions. Open source tools and code libraries, alongside the popularity of digital photography, threaten to commoditize the functionality provided by Photoshop, Adobe’s crown jewel on the content authoring side. Witness the Gimp, or Pixelmator, the inexpensive Photoshop alternative built by two people using the GPL’d ImageMagick software libraries. On the competitive front, it’s no secret Apple has taken a significant bite out of the video authoring market with Final Cut Pro. And, in addition, it’s beginning to look like Adobe has been headed off at the pass by web technologies in their quest to make Flash a key development platform for mobile, since mobile devices have gotten browsers before they have gotten decent Flash player support.

Also, consider the following list of 45 interactive prototyping tools:

http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2009/03/24/rapid-prototyping-tools

Adobe’s Flash Catalyst software is the only as-yet-unreleased software on the list. Considering their ownership of the marketplace for interactive and static design tools, you would think they would already have a clear lead in developing prototyping software for web applications, and yet there are small developers providing more viable alternatives. Even Microsoft has managed to pique the interest of designers (unthinkable!) with their new prototyping tool, SketchFlow.

The question I find myself asking (and hoping against) is – is Adobe weighing the success of Acrobat vs. the success of its creative toolset and deciding their money is better spent trying to somehow enterprise-ize their creative authoring tools than continuing to do the hard work of innovating in this marketplace? Maybe lock people into using Flash by making it the only tool that plays well with a reporting system tied to business analysis?

Many have their hat off to Adobe already for completing a successful merger with Macromedia, but try to find a Flash developer who likes Adobe Help better than Macromedia’s, or a designer who thinks that Flash is an easy tool to work with.

Don’t be fooled Adobe – there is still lots to be done making the next generation of creative content tools. You’ve already confused the designers who make up your core market for creative tools by bringing developers into the fold. Are you sure you want to start building in features for business analysts as well?

I read Mike Shield’s article today in AdWeek titled " Complaints Rise Against Video Ad Nets " and it brings up the question: What is fair play in pre-roll, and how do marketers figure out who’s playing nice and who’s automatically playing their video below the fold to boost numbers?

Pre-roll CPMs are too high to waste below-the-fold, even when using an ad network. Using an impartial 3rd-party to serve ad content (as opposed to the network itself) can help alert advertisers to duplicitous practices. Unicast’s ad server provides each advert we serve with the intelligence to know where it is on the page - left-side, right-side, top, bottom – when it plays.

To help keep ad networks honest, how about the industry requires reporting feedback that tells advertisers where on the page their pre-roll was when it started to play? If you’re an advertiser using pre-roll, you should demand this of your ad networks/servers now. And automatic playing shouldn’t happen automatically. The IAB should recommend user-play video by default along with the development of new metrics that disaggregate user-play impressions vs. auto-play impressions, much like the IAB did in enforcing the disaggregation of image vs. rich media impressions. Armed with this information, advertisers will be able to punish the ad networks that waste their pre-roll spend.