I am almost tired of commenting on statements and positioning from Apple. I am not going to say I am tired of Steve Jobs, as I do find him entertaining.

There is a lengthy open letter on the apple site, and it reads like the other shoe dropping. Check it out here.

The letter clarifies why Flash has not been allowed on Apple devices outside of the desktop. It carefully avoids speaking to the many other runtimes not allowed on the iPhone, iPod, or iPad. Perhaps this is because Flash is the most well-adopted of the plugins and so is often the focus of debate.

The letter does nothing to make me reconsider my earlier assessment of the situation, which can be found here;
On Apples Terms
Apple and Adobe Work Together
Four Part Series
Oddly Sunday Feb 14

It is important to look at statements from Apple or any other large corporation under the lens that they exist to make money. That’s not a bad thing, it is simply how things are. Companies need money to exist, and making it is their primary function. They can also do a lot of good, introduce new technologies and innovations, and smart companies are showing that the two goals are not incompatible in many cases.

In the open letter, Apple explains their position in the following areas:

1. They maintain that Adobe’s products, like their own, are proprietary.
2. They list security problems with the flash player.
3. They claim the player makes macs crash.
4. They claim that flash does not perform well on mobile devices, and additionally claim that they have asked Adobe for years to show Flash performing well on a mobile device.
5. They claim Flash drains battery life.
6. They suggest Flash does not work with touch interfaces and relies on rollovers.

These points can be debated endlessly, and they are justifications, not motivations. Let us look at motives a little more closely.

For The Consumer

Let me pose a ‘what if’ question. What if the Flash player ran beautifully on Apple devices? What if the battery was not drained any faster than similar operations with webkit? What if it worked beautifully with touch. In other words, if you factor out the technology claims, would Apple then accept Flash?

Absolutely not. And the reason would simply be that cross-platform compatibility is bad for Apple’s core business of making money selling expensive hardware. The most honest statement in the letter reads like this:

“We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers”

This is the crux of the matter and the only thing anyone needs to know about this open letter. Apple makes money by attempting to create new markets rather than competing in already existing markets where they are a weak competitor. They simply cannot abandon that strategy, and requiring the cooperation of other parties such as Adobe endangers that.

To Clarify

I hope that by pointing out simple observations no one gets the impression that I am anti-Apple. They are just a company, not a person. Elsewhere on this blog I’ve been clear that I am not inclined to any particular platform. However, I’m also not naive to accept all statements at face-value, particularly those that come with no references to case studies.

It seems Youtube has finally updated their player design for the first time since June of 2007. This move was long overdue, and the change is very welcome.

New Player Design

In terms of the aesthetics, Youtube has done quite a few things to improve their player. Squared off corners are more modern, the whole rounded corners movement has pretty much died out (observe the Adobe icons these days – kind of ironic that the moment we got rounded corners in CSS and 9-slice scaling in flash the whole fad died).

Strong use of icons help to create user conventions in the design. It is not at all hard to know where to click, and most rollovers and clicks come with a very nice feedback mechanism that gives a tactile sense to the experience. I’m particularly delighted with the volume control, that slides out like a tile with a satisfying speed and is easier to grab and manipulate.

The progress bar is a big improvement. While the user is interacting, it gets thicker to provide more visible area. Without interaction, it shrinks away nicely, tucking itself close to the bottom to provide progress information without distracting from the video itself. As a nice little touch, the progress thumb itself does a little expand-contract pop as yet another feedback mechanism for user interaction.

The quality of the video is higher as well. Some of my already uploaded videos show at better image quality, up to 1080p and that was a very nice thing for youtube to do that must have cost them in terms of encoding bandwidth. I do find that audio often encodes quite poorly, but I’m aware of the challenges involved in properly encoding audio server-side. Computers don’t listen to the sound, they just perform math on it.

No Embedding Yet

Thus far, it does not seem possible to embed the new Youtube player outside of Youtube. Not sure exactly why that would be other than perhaps they are taking a page from Facebook, which allows you to embed video outside of Facebook but not at the highest quality. For the full quality you have to link back to their site. This no doubt cuts down on server load and also helps to drive traffic.

A quick look at the embed code being used shows a few improvements, such as proper closing xhtml-like parameters. Strangely they don’t show up in the code if you use the right-click (context menu) method to grab embed code. That’s a small point.

I would also like to see the options for customization beefed up a bit. But this is definitely a step in the right direction!

Last night at the annual SCA awards, two Oddlies picked up top honors in their categories, and we could not be more proud of them.

The SCA awards are nominated and selected by the faculty of Seneca’s School of Communication Arts. The show itself is produced by the student body, and has a youthful flair to it.

Trevor Henry

Trevor Henry picked up top overall honors for outstanding achievements in Digital Media Arts. Trevor is a designer, photographer, and artist. It has been my pleasure to know him since his second semester in DMA. He has come through the Oddly in-house artist program, our internship program, and worked part time with us while pursuing his scholastic career. He is an FITC award nominee for best porfolio, and has recently accepted a fulltime position with Henderson Bas.

Courtney Lunn

Courtney Lunn received top honors for video production for her work on a zombie-thriller. Courtney is a top student and is currently interning at Oddly Studios, where she has done everything from graphic design to building social networks. She seems capable of learning just about anything. This is not the first time her video work has been recognized – she’s the winner of a FITC pass for her video submission to their annual contest (as is our other awesome Oddly video-artist Shazzmin). Courtney will no doubt keep on winning, as she has a winning attitude. She’s also the nicest person.

Congratulations

It is extremely rewarding to work with these excellent minds. I should also mention that several more of the students from my Advanced Development group were nominated in various categories as well. I certainly wish all of them the very best as they kick-start what must surely become distinguished careers. I look forward to working with you!

Today there is a subtle change to Facebook fan pages. The message “become a fan” that was listed in the button users would click to connect to the brand was replaced with the simple word “like”.

According to the message from Facebook, they hope this action will feel much more lightweight and increase the number of connections made across the site. See below.

Increasing numbers of connections are in the interests of Facebook, of course. But are they in the interest of the companies that use the fan page service?
On the surface it would seem so, many companies judge success by the number of fans that their page generates. (Some have even estimated a monetary value to fans, something in the range of $3.60 per). By that standard, the new messaging seems like a good idea. It is easy to point to large numbers of connections as a standard for success.

However, there is another standard for success that is harder to measure. Just how engaged are those users when they click the button? Are they making any kind of emotional attachment or commitment, even a subtle one, when they make that connection? There is a very strong parallel between emotional engagement and memory retention. Valence, the extent to which we feel positively or negatively, has been linked directly with affective memory – memories that promote action in us. The kind of action that brands like to see, such as purchases or conversations.

New Wording Too Casual?

In other words, is a “like” too casual? Compared to “becoming a fan”, which bears with it certain connotations of commitment, is the new option too much of a watering down in messaging? We could also examine whether this is a bit of a trick on Facebook’s part. There are options to “like” on every user’s wall, but clicking it does not make you a fan. Is there some attempt here to pad the numbers of active fans up using conventions found elsewhere in the site?

At some point, Facebook is no doubt seeking to monetize further the fan page service. As an example, it is very hard on a fan page to implement any kind of analytics. Clever people have come up with their own solutions to this, such as using Flash or loading images from a server that can track the image loads (somewhat unreliable in our tests). However, Facebook is working on their own analytics solution, through their partnership with Adobe-owned Omniture. Will this be one service that Facebook will charge for? If so, then large numbers of fans (no matter their engagement) makes sense from a business point of view.

Facebook as a CDN

It is not hard to imagine Facebook fleshing out their business offering, starting with the fan page and going from there. Already it becomes very obvious that Facebook intends to leverage their status as a social network into a content distribution service, where the content can be contextually selected on the basis of social network connections. Facebook connect is already being used well in that regard. Check out the excellent Huffington Post social as an example of this.

As a scenario, perhaps in the future we will find it quite unusual to make any kind of purchase without first scanning our social network for recommendations, images, videos associated with that product. This would be the next iteration of Amazon Reviews, where the reviewers would be somehow some way connected to us via social graph. Our trust level for the review would be higher, because the reviewers (or perhaps it will be “commenters” or “likers”) will be associated with us. Companies like Facebook are working on making that happen. Mobile devices will enable it even further, making those networks ultimately portable.

Then again, maybe it’s just a “like” button…