While the last weeks where really busy for me, I stumbled yesterday in the late evening merely by accident over a cool new site that describes itself as: “Photojournalism & Storytelling, Create a media wall of photos, video, text & music.” The site is called VUVOX.com.

Although the service is for now in private Beta (and I unfortunately have no access to the Beta for now) I was really impressed by the concept and the description of the user interface they give on their site. The concept is quite easy: they give the user the ability to create a multi-media photowall by stitching together photographs, adding hotspots that link to texts, music files, video or anything else. The output is rendered as a flash movie. While you could do this in the past already if you where Flash savvy, the main point of the service seems to be a set of tools given to the average user. So creativity is not restricted by the lack of technical expertise. They describe their features on the site as follows:

“Features include:

• Dynamic media positioning and assembly tools
• Image Cut-out and Masking tools
• Layer positioning and Compositing
• Interactive ‘Hot-spots’, providing links to media,
  text or other websites
• Ability to add rich media details”

All sounds very intuitive and the samples on the site look promising as well.

This service will change definitely what photoblogging will be in the future. I can’t wait to get my hands on a working version of COLLAGE!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: web2.0, photography, rich media, vuvox.com, photoblog, photoblogging, phlog

I count the blogs of the employees of Hitwise, Inc. to my first and favourite ressources when it comes to get the buzz of the latest hypes and trends in the website market. With some detail and and a professional data background here insights and findings about changes in website traffic are presented and then analyzed. Lately Lee Ann Prescott, a main researcher there, postet about youtube.com. She found that the traffic to youtube.com was now greater than the traffic to the main TV network websites combined. This news is the kind of buzz out of which most of the Web 2.0 hype is emerging. Although some colleagues and I made comments on the blog of Lee Ann, I want to discuss this here a little bit more in detail.

First this news sounds for the layman like: „TV is now dead, all the people are switching to youtube.com instead of watching TV in the future.“ This, of course, is completely nonsense. Just by finding that youtube.com has videos on it and many people are surfing to their site just don’t say anything about their preference of watching TV. The main point of the study here should be read as that youtube has a more compelling website to offer to the main audience, than the TV networks. But the main business of TV networks is not running websites, it is broadcasting. So this is like comparing -to qoute an old german saying- apples with peaches.

The future of TV may somehow be connected to broadband internet and some aspects of web 2.0, but it won’t be replaced by something like youtube.com. The future of Television is a hometheatrical experience - it is HDTV and surround sound. youtube.com is a place to share funny or disgusting or any other kind of amateurish video. It is also a place where people post their recordings from TV and can comment on them. And it is also a place, where professionals can promote their work by „trailering“ their videos to a global audience. But this is in most cases more self-marketing than broadcasting.

The future of webvideo will definetly change to higher picture and sound quality – definetly it will reach the HDTV/surround sound mark very soon for a broader audience. Videoserver technology seems to be quite ready, but is now waiting for greater bandwidth and a more defined network infrastructure. VideoLAN is a very interesting opensource project, I have constantly an eye on. But my guess is, that you will not see a Youtube with a HDTV streaming service. For many technical and practical reasons I believe more in a scenario, where the user decides to see a special programme and than a software like Freevo or some automated Bittorent clone is downloading this in the background via a peer to peer system.

All this is not really ready for prime time yet, but it will be sooner than some today expect. The interesting thing for a webdesigner is, that those technologies will open new possibilities both in programming and in design of webapplications. I think, this will do for webvideo what the DVD did for consumer homevideo – both in terms of quality and in terms of design: think of the animated menus or games you find nowadays on almost every DVD and remember VHS.

When I look at all the nowadays famous and successful Web 2.0 applications, something quite astonishing comes to my thoughts: while many of those applications are meant to be used by people during their leisure time, none of the successful ones deals by its nature with something that comes close to „interactive entertainment“ or even „games“. Yes of course, watching videos on youtube.com is most of the time entertaining and even somehow interactive (since the user can decide, what video to watch or can leave a comment – if you really want to call this already „interactive“). On the other side, sites like secondlife.com are not generally called first to be Web 2.0 sites, since they lack some important characteristics, that seems to be generally necessary to receive the merit of being considered as Web 2.0. So I ask myself, why are so few people try to connect the rich experiences that exists in the field of the computer game industry with possibilities of Web 2.0? Or am I just missing some interesting development? (If so, please comment to this post!)

To start thinking about it deeper, I have to talk (very shortly!) about, what the characteristics of a Web 2.0 application are for me today. There are three main points:

1. It’s content is constantly developed/maintained/pushed forward by a community of people. Examples are Wikipedia, digg.com or again youtube.com

2. It runs within a common browser without exotic software add-ons (this one is obvious: The whole thing is called „Web 2.0“ - not „Special Software 2.0“ or something like this)

3. The interaction of a critical mass of users created something, that not otherwise could exist or be created – either because the development cost would be too high or the whole concept is the networked inter operation of real people (Examples are del.icio.us and flickr.com)

Saying this, many of the huge and successful Massive Multiplayer Online (Roleplaying) Games are near those characteristics of Web 2.0. They exist, because many people live a „second life“ online as some Fantasy Hero or Villain. By spending their time in those worlds, they are the same time it’s content. Some games even allow the players to create worlds or parts on their own. So point 1) and 3) seems to be clearly fulfilled.

But as the infrastructure of the Internet and it’s protocols and servers is used, for several technical and business issues the great and successful ones among those titles are not running in a common browser – they come as (mostly) commercial software, which has to be installed on a computer. Titles to notice here are for instance World of Warcraft or LOTR online.

One interesting thing in this market are the games like ogame, which are called browser games. They fulfill point 2.) as well as the other ones, because they are played in a conventional browser. From my personal researches they gained over the last year massively in momentum, especially among younger male players – which is quite interesting, since those browser games offer a visual entertainment of nearly zero. But the audience of younger males, which owns and knows mostly the modern 3D graphics PCs and consoles nevertheless uses and plays those games, although that are visually as hot as the front page of google.com. Time will tell, if that is just a short episode or a trend. It may be, that content and real user/gamer interaction is experiencing a revival among the gamers, it may also be that it is just kind of trendy to have something like ascii art on your screen instead of full fledged 3D graphics.

So where is the professional Web 2.0 concept that will be somehow the next big thing in interactive entertainment? By researching this I came along some interesting experiments like wednus DRPG or dutchpipe. The first one is the attempt to program a game with dhtml/javascript framework, the latter is a server experiment for a persistent online world (which is what you need for something like a real multiplayer game like WoW). But if you really want do those things, openlaszlo has everything you need. So if technology exists, and nobody is using it for interactive entertainment in Web 2.0, there seems to be no market. Or simply no business idea?

On the other side they exists an active community of enthusiasts that develop and read interactive fiction (which is more a classical single player game approach). But there is nothing I found, that combines those proven markets (the interactive entertainment industry is performing mainly well, so it’s no niche business) with the hype and the possibilities of Web 2.0.

Did I missed something? Please let me know!

While I’m working in the multimedia / film / entertainment industry for more than 15 years, I have seen many trends in interactive media. They came and then sooner or later they disapeared. But some things not only remained, they developed over the years more and more and became important parts of my everyday work and of the everyday user experience on the web.

One interesting thing to notice is, that one technology or one product alone often did not made it from start to finish. It was just more or less, that a certain product opened the way of creating a new kind of user experience - then the competition came out with a better product or a more economic approach of doing things.

I remember 1992 when I started my professional career as Photographer and Filmmaker. I had a new Apple Mac on my desktop and was one of the early customers of a product called Macromind Director 1.0 (later the company changed it’s name to Macromedia). This program gave me as a non-programmer the opportunity to create easily interactive animations, screendesigns and later with the advent of Apple Quicktime and the integration in to Director also the possibility to create short interactive movies, where scenes where switched by some buttons pressed.

The image size was not more like a stamp and image quality was even worse than todays mobile phone displays. Some colleagues whom I showed my first interactive movie piece just said, that this is not acceptable for them even to watch because of the lack of image quality. They did not get the point: of course this was not meant to be rivaling to BetaSP (the videoformat of choice those days) - but it was interactive, and it was Digital Video on CD. It was long before DVD’s where even described on whitepaper. It was just a stone on the road to something, that is quite common today.

Another example came up in the 1990’s with a product called “The Future Splash Player”. Some guys made an authoring software and a plugin for the new internet browsers Netscape and Explorer, with which one could create easily interactive vector animations. Macromedia, which had a Plugin for Director called Shockwave, realized that those vector animations where much smaller then the bitmap-based animations from their own product Director. So they bought the company and renamed this new acquired software to “Flash” - the rest is history.

Flash became a web-ubiquity, Macromedia became THE company on the road to more interactive user experiences on the web. They used early claims like “What the web can be” and are by many means one of the most important driving forces towards the Web 2.0.

Also they where clever enough to cash-out their company, when they realized that the time of commercial and propriatrary software was over. Flash became in the late 90’s and early 2000’s for many designer/developers the universal weapon. You saw a lot of Flash-only sites with almost no HTML at all. In the beginning there were only static pieces of code, later with new versions of Flash adressing on this issue they grew more and more to become real webapplications. As an end point they came up with technolgies like Coldfusion and Flex for creating really dynamic Flash/Web applications

But somehow Flex isn’t so compelling to me like OpenLaszlo, and Flashfiles are for me more and more “degrading” to assets on a page like .jpg, .pdf or more and more .svg. Youtube is a good example: Web 2.0 needs Flash only for videoplayback. Maybe I’m just tired after all these years, maybe the cash-out to Adobe itself made me insecure about these tools in general. Should I rely my work solely to software companies, that can be sold or just disappear? Remember Kai Krause and Metacreations?

Different product - same thing: one day they cashed-out their company, sold all their software titles to different companies. The innovation was away, the new owners just maintain the software more or less (Poser for instance is a nice tool still, but except of better models and some performance improvement it’s still quite they same like in Metacreation days …)

Open source software solutions are a more reliable solution for me - they cannot disappear from now to then, because they are created by a greater community and are in this way more redundant. In another way they are often more mature then their commercial counterpart. How’s that come? Open source software is often modeled after a commercial (or a lack of commercial) software. By this fact it is clear, that the mistakes made in their commercial counterpart can be avoided and features can be added, that where overlooked by the original software designers but in demand by the users. Writing this, I can now close the circle to Web2.0 and Macromedia. They started something in the industry - the development of media-rich, interactive applications, even something like today’s webapplication.

But the time of commercial apllications to create those applications is now turning to an end (sorry to write this, Adobe). Same is true for Flash as the only way to create those user interfaces. Today DHTML, JavaScript and PHP (aka AJAX) are experiencing a revival, as there are relatively old (what means old in the terms of the internet?) technologies. I’ll expect in the near future to see more open sourced authoring and development tools for Web 2.0 apps to become more and more popular.

And on the road to that we can than point more attention to usability and originality in the design process. Open source gives us as designers and developers a much greater freedom in shaping the tools that will shape Web 3.0.

This site (www.jobst-von-heintze.com) will be my personal diary on this journey.