Side Door Economics? Try Butterfly Effect Economics.
How does Google make a 30% increase this quarter in the middle of an economic downturn when they give everything away for free?
Selling advertising? Bums in seats?
Sorry, Charlie, its not that simple. In fact, as the social networking neural pathways develop, they create vastly more complex paths between you and financial success. Fortunatley, there are theoretically infinitely more of them.
To determine the intelligence of an animal, they are often tested to see if they can establish an abstract relationship between them and their food and thus achieve the goal. For example, if a lever is pressed, it opens a gate which allows poor rat 23756 to get his cheese. The more steps the rat is able to use his hunger to motivate him to learn, the more "intelligent" the rat is. Say the lever is on the opposite wall of the cage, thus away from the food. The relationship becomes more abstract as the rat then needs to figure out the relationship of the lever and the door without necessarily seeing them both and their mutual effect at the same time.
Add to that complexities, perhaps the lever needs to be held down while the door is open, but its too far away for the rat to rush from the lever to the door before it closes, so the rat needs to find something else (another rat perhaps?) to hold the lever while they go for the door, and mabey even figure out that sharing the cheese will result in this partnership working out in the future.
Welcome to a social networking business model. Those who manage to solve the puzzles currently being generated by the massive abstract neural network of people... connected across geography, time, and modes of communication...win the cheese. Those who give up on the puzzle early starve.
Sometimes it may be as simple as this. I have an island in Second Life. That island costs me $295 a month to maintain as my own. Many people just rent their islands to other people and get a direct A-B business out of it. Not me, no revenue, it largely just sits there, mostly vacant, with some nice free areas for people to roam and reflect in a lovely virtual forest with beautiful ambient music. What a waste of money, people might say. Wow, you must be rich, others say. Nope, neither. Im quite poor, and have significant debt at the moment (but the relationship to the island is again, abstract)
Because I have it, I take my time in second life and think about it quite often. I think about how it works, the significance of it. Because I have an island, when I do speak to other secondlife people, I get instant rapport and am not dismissed as another freeloader. It is a massive, interactive calling card that immediately demonstrates to all who visit my skills and taste in asthetic design, environment, and for those who like it, it begins a conversation without words.
What has all this brought me personally? Well, over the past year, I have had many things happen that I can trace back to my island ownership in one way or another. Amazing things. I was hired to do a job that paid me $15,000 over 3 months part time that I would not have gotten had I not set up this virtual, conversational context for myself. I met a composer who liked my island so much, he composed an album of ambient music specifically for it. This person also represented "Gibson Guitars" in second life and now my island is positioned next door to theirs.
I met an engineer/producer named Gary who flew me and my wife to L.A. for a visit thanks, in part, to my context. I was flown to SanFrancisco and met the CEO and staff of Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, again because of the context I established. In SF, I met others who were working to establish their own "contexts" and were making, in some cases, upwards of 10,000 a month with theirs. I couldnt begin to describe the convaluted paths money and opportunity takes to flow to all these people, but it does, and they were all happy, intelligent, and excited about their lives.
If you arent in Second Life, you are missing out. I dont think you necessarily have to own an island to derive value there, but it could be relative to the level of success.
Ive often thought to myself, how does Coke, Pizza Hut, and what not REALLY make money from an ad on television? Its hard to trace and probably benefits their competition just as much.
Thats THE KEY. Social networking is about you doing some action that benefits everyone. You dont get paid in money right away though, instead, like Coke, Pizza Hut, etc, you need to think about your actions creating ripples that tell two friends who tell two friends, they buy the other guy's product but are still encouraging support for your market vertical, your locale, your community (online or off).
If Dell advertises a mini laptop, Sony actually indirectly benefits in some ways because the person who saw it buys the even smaller sony...and then someone who saw these two computers at the airport makes the buying decision to get an acer aspire one. While at the mall to buy the dell, they all buy a coffee and some thumbdrives, and a lovely wicker stand. The ad dropped the stone in the pond, and many benefitted from the waves.
Of course, in TV advertising, none of those pathways can be traced by the vendor, they just assume it will happen when they pay 1,000,000 for a 30 second spot on tv for the super bowl.
In the new social networking economy, those pathways can be traced and turned into hard data that can influence the next "stone dropping" position, force, or size. For the first time, social networking enables the public to benefit from this en masse advertising for "brand awareness" that rivals or even trumps the capabilities of the big corporate juggernaut.
I used to play a game called "Myst URU", kind of the realtime 3d first person puzzle solving version of the original myst. Eventually I played a game which I believe to be one of the most brilliant puzzle games to date, called "Portal". Both of these games require the player to be observant of their surroundings, acknowledge that the answers are all there, just not quite grokked, and with time, experience, and a dash of cleverness, can all be solved with relatively simple tools. Sometimes the steps proved quite irritating and over convaluted, but the reward of solving the puzzle in both of those games were well worth the chase to me.
Another important thing to realize is that rewards will be delayed, or non monitary, but sometimes the non monitary rewards end up being the most treasured, the most valueable. If you are able to pay your rent with the income you make, you are in a position to use whatever other time and opportunity you have to build wealth in relationships, asthetics, social wealth etc. Fortunately you dont (yet) have to pay tax on those things.
I'll end with this example. Ning.com is a social network platform. Ive been setting up ning networks for clients who either 1. cant afford a big CMS / UMS but need one, or 2. are new to Social Networking but hesitant to invest the big money.
In both cases, the personal wealth I have derived from doing this work has been incalculable. No money per - se, yet, but I have established several life long friendships, gotten respect at work and among my peers, and even have an 8 ton granite inukshuk in my backyard all as a direct result of my efforts with Ning. The effort of a few hours here and there have made me more skilled, got me blogging, and helped me help dozens if not hundreds of people discover their own new pathways. I'll keep you posted. Oh and check out my virtual self's blog...he owes his existence to my virtual island!
Friday, April 17, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
social networking is the most important thing you can do
If you perceive social networking as a game, or waste of time, or frivolous, you are in for a rude awakening.
Social networks are the building blocks of a new organism, the latest manifestation of the collective conciousness of human beings.
As the internet was born, the first aspects of social networks took the form of irc chat rooms and email. This led to unprecidented speed and efficiency in many displaced humans sharing ideas across newly formed pathways.
Out of these rooms basic asynchronous communication developed in the form of a "forum" which allowed pathways of communication to form not only across geophysical boundaries, but now temporal ones, IE a person can join a conversation within its context with out having to be same place/same time.
By introducing ways to communicate across these pathways in non-text forms, such as posting photos, groups, fan pages, interests, changing colors, building 3d worlds, avatars etc, Social networks have introduced the latest vector across which communication paths can form.
All this is directly analgous to neural development, and since thoughts take all these kinds of forms as they move from neuron to neuron, and all the neurons are simultaneously connected in multiple dimensions, we have the unprecidented capacity to act as a single organism, a collected consiousness.
Those who choose to remain outside the collective will either be necessarily assimilated or face abandonment, just like rogue cells in a body. But the body is extremely intolerant of rogues, in that it fights their very existence for its own survival.
Interestingly though, each member or "neuron" is like no other, there is no uniformity within the neuron, only connectedness. The collective necessitates that we all remain wholly intact as we enter into it, and only expand our own individuality through the tendrils reaching to the others. This is not an oppressive utopia, it is actually the birth of our next phase of evolution, and its as unstoppable as nature itself.
Social networks are the building blocks of a new organism, the latest manifestation of the collective conciousness of human beings.
As the internet was born, the first aspects of social networks took the form of irc chat rooms and email. This led to unprecidented speed and efficiency in many displaced humans sharing ideas across newly formed pathways.
Out of these rooms basic asynchronous communication developed in the form of a "forum" which allowed pathways of communication to form not only across geophysical boundaries, but now temporal ones, IE a person can join a conversation within its context with out having to be same place/same time.
By introducing ways to communicate across these pathways in non-text forms, such as posting photos, groups, fan pages, interests, changing colors, building 3d worlds, avatars etc, Social networks have introduced the latest vector across which communication paths can form.
All this is directly analgous to neural development, and since thoughts take all these kinds of forms as they move from neuron to neuron, and all the neurons are simultaneously connected in multiple dimensions, we have the unprecidented capacity to act as a single organism, a collected consiousness.
Those who choose to remain outside the collective will either be necessarily assimilated or face abandonment, just like rogue cells in a body. But the body is extremely intolerant of rogues, in that it fights their very existence for its own survival.
Interestingly though, each member or "neuron" is like no other, there is no uniformity within the neuron, only connectedness. The collective necessitates that we all remain wholly intact as we enter into it, and only expand our own individuality through the tendrils reaching to the others. This is not an oppressive utopia, it is actually the birth of our next phase of evolution, and its as unstoppable as nature itself.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Turn your Content into Conversation
Yesterday at our staff meeting with Jeff Jarvis, I was quite inspired and came up with 2 phrases summing up web 3.0 that I want to put here for posterity:
Web 3.0 - turn your content into conversation™
Web 3.0 - stop being the wall, and become the floor.™
Web 3.0 - public conversations trump private ones.™
First one, fairly self explanatory just take your big long statements and allow comments, or further, make your content become the conversations between your customers, clients, and peers, and extract value from that like Google does.
The second one is less good as it requires the context of, you know, being a wall in a room with say a big monitor displaying all your various value props, and instead, become the platform that supports everyone else...let them walk all over you but be dependent on you, they can leave the room, but if you are a good floor, they will come back and you can look up their skirts. I suppose that metaphor works for gathering information but its a bit crass. Apologies.
Third one...basically a conversation held in private like an email or IM or whatever is useless, in that you cant reuse it or extract PR value from it, or have the benefit of other perspectives applied to it. If you instead use public statements in a forum, others can react, respond etc, plus you can demonstrate your character to your entire audience. "Humanize it" is what Jeff Jarvis said.
So thats my summary from the Jeff Jarvis meeting...and I'm trademarking those three statements ( ha ha )
Web 3.0 - turn your content into conversation™
Web 3.0 - stop being the wall, and become the floor.™
Web 3.0 - public conversations trump private ones.™
First one, fairly self explanatory just take your big long statements and allow comments, or further, make your content become the conversations between your customers, clients, and peers, and extract value from that like Google does.
The second one is less good as it requires the context of, you know, being a wall in a room with say a big monitor displaying all your various value props, and instead, become the platform that supports everyone else...let them walk all over you but be dependent on you, they can leave the room, but if you are a good floor, they will come back and you can look up their skirts. I suppose that metaphor works for gathering information but its a bit crass. Apologies.
Third one...basically a conversation held in private like an email or IM or whatever is useless, in that you cant reuse it or extract PR value from it, or have the benefit of other perspectives applied to it. If you instead use public statements in a forum, others can react, respond etc, plus you can demonstrate your character to your entire audience. "Humanize it" is what Jeff Jarvis said.
So thats my summary from the Jeff Jarvis meeting...and I'm trademarking those three statements ( ha ha )
Sunday, April 12, 2009
My RSS Feed aggregator
Finally got my RSS feed aggregator working. Whats an rss feed aggregator? The little widget below reads a list of RSS feeds RSS from an XML file and displays the RSS feed news items from all the feeds in order of most recent to earliest. Theres a few of these out there, but mine is free for you to use, and has some interesting features. If you press the grey button underneath a specific feed name you toggle it on or off in the list. Pressing the red button makes the feed become "solo" or the only one in the list, and you can toggle that off and go back to your previous settings.
The "reset" button resets your filter feeds toggles as they are saved in the flash shared object "cookie" (to let your website visitors pick which blogs they want to keep up to date on and not have to keep resetting that)
You can popup the viewer here and see it resizes with whatever window you put it in. Working on adding custom colors/fonts etc.
I'll continue improving it, but for now you can view source and embed/tweak the above code to play around with it on your website if you want. Ive tested it with blogs from blogger, twitter feeds, and NING blog feeds. Known issues...turning off all the feed sources causes a weird display I need to fix, workaround is you just turn one back on. Also if you are on a slower connection try to let the feeds load before clicking buttons. I havent really built too much "idiot proofing" into this yet. This particular one is built in AS1, my next one will be in AS3 as I get time and guage the popularity of this app. Updates to come...Enjoy!
The "reset" button resets your filter feeds toggles as they are saved in the flash shared object "cookie" (to let your website visitors pick which blogs they want to keep up to date on and not have to keep resetting that)
You can popup the viewer here and see it resizes with whatever window you put it in. Working on adding custom colors/fonts etc.
I'll continue improving it, but for now you can view source and embed/tweak the above code to play around with it on your website if you want. Ive tested it with blogs from blogger, twitter feeds, and NING blog feeds. Known issues...turning off all the feed sources causes a weird display I need to fix, workaround is you just turn one back on. Also if you are on a slower connection try to let the feeds load before clicking buttons. I havent really built too much "idiot proofing" into this yet. This particular one is built in AS1, my next one will be in AS3 as I get time and guage the popularity of this app. Updates to come...Enjoy!
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Replacing humans with technology
Recently I was asked to review a product that fit in the "powerpoint killer" category of applications. Threaded throughout the marketing material were phrases that appeal to the cost cutting business manager audience who often find themselves frustrated by the effort and knowledge required to build engaging, interactive presentations or games.
"With a click of a button... " , "reduced costs without sacrificing quality...", and "replace expensive technicians and professional designers..."
These products can be fantastic tools at extending your team's abilities, inspiring your team's experts to greater tasks and saving time and money.
That said, the products also wedge themselves between you and your basic technology. If, as in our company's case, the underlying technology we build our product in is flash, then we could buy some auto-flash generation tool to save time, but we then become dependent on that tool, its developers, and ongoing support and updates, on top of Adobe and its flash product.
Once the product is entrenched, the idea of leaving the product becomes less and less feasable for your company as you "save time" in the here and now, but become more and more estranged from the core technology as your team focuses on the middleware instead of learning the basics.
Not only are you then dependant on the product's technology and what it allows or doesnt allow you to do, you then become married to the company strategy of the product. If they, say, decide that the military vertical is their most profitable, their tool will evolve to serve that vertical more than your vertical or niche.
To avoid this kind of scenario, many platforms are "open source" or almost open source. This means you can always go into the code of the platform and tweak it to suit your needs, if you have to, as well as being able to strip out the features you dont need and extend any features you like.
Flash itself allows you to extend and manipulate it down to its core, yet Adobe also provides scores of automatable, customizable components. Beyond that, a developer base of tens of thousands of independent component developers provide innumerable tools that your team can use, expand upon, or be inspired by to push your product beyond that of your competitors.
Your product IS your people, so investing in platforms, technology, and training that will extend the capabilities of your staff and bring them to a higher level of skill will always give your company a competitive edge. Any product that becomes what amounts to a crutch for your staff to save a few minutes but sacrifice learning important skills in the process, will make your company less and less able to cope with change and market demand.
In conclusion, I encourage everyone to buy tools that can be extended, stripped, pulled apart, and tweaked, and work well with all the other tools out there. In terms of platforms I use xml, google, ning.com, mediawiki, blogger, anything RSS capable, and of course my all time favorite...flash! With these tools I feel I can do pretty much anything in terms of web based applications. When spec'ing out a new RIA, I generally start with XML and defining the webservices methods and datatypes all in XML, keeping each component as discreet and plug and playable as possible, capable of using off the shelf stuff, or moving on without it depending on the circumstance.
"With a click of a button... " , "reduced costs without sacrificing quality...", and "replace expensive technicians and professional designers..."
These products can be fantastic tools at extending your team's abilities, inspiring your team's experts to greater tasks and saving time and money.
That said, the products also wedge themselves between you and your basic technology. If, as in our company's case, the underlying technology we build our product in is flash, then we could buy some auto-flash generation tool to save time, but we then become dependent on that tool, its developers, and ongoing support and updates, on top of Adobe and its flash product.
Once the product is entrenched, the idea of leaving the product becomes less and less feasable for your company as you "save time" in the here and now, but become more and more estranged from the core technology as your team focuses on the middleware instead of learning the basics.
Not only are you then dependant on the product's technology and what it allows or doesnt allow you to do, you then become married to the company strategy of the product. If they, say, decide that the military vertical is their most profitable, their tool will evolve to serve that vertical more than your vertical or niche.
To avoid this kind of scenario, many platforms are "open source" or almost open source. This means you can always go into the code of the platform and tweak it to suit your needs, if you have to, as well as being able to strip out the features you dont need and extend any features you like.
Flash itself allows you to extend and manipulate it down to its core, yet Adobe also provides scores of automatable, customizable components. Beyond that, a developer base of tens of thousands of independent component developers provide innumerable tools that your team can use, expand upon, or be inspired by to push your product beyond that of your competitors.
Your product IS your people, so investing in platforms, technology, and training that will extend the capabilities of your staff and bring them to a higher level of skill will always give your company a competitive edge. Any product that becomes what amounts to a crutch for your staff to save a few minutes but sacrifice learning important skills in the process, will make your company less and less able to cope with change and market demand.
In conclusion, I encourage everyone to buy tools that can be extended, stripped, pulled apart, and tweaked, and work well with all the other tools out there. In terms of platforms I use xml, google, ning.com, mediawiki, blogger, anything RSS capable, and of course my all time favorite...flash! With these tools I feel I can do pretty much anything in terms of web based applications. When spec'ing out a new RIA, I generally start with XML and defining the webservices methods and datatypes all in XML, keeping each component as discreet and plug and playable as possible, capable of using off the shelf stuff, or moving on without it depending on the circumstance.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Why Facebook Looks Like Twitter...
Here is a snapshot of the traffic on these websites, ranked where "1" is the most visted website on the 'net, and 10000 is the 10000th most visited website. As you can see...Facebook is plateauing with a gentle increase in the past year, Yahoo has seen a recent sharp drop, twitter.com and ning.com are experiencing significant increases, with Twitter being the most pronounced most recently, and second life has a steady decline.
Now its interesting that roughly when Twitter sees the spike in their useage is close to just before we saw facebook change its pages and profiles to look almost exactly like twitter's.
My purpose in grouping these particular websites is to draw a comparison between sites that are "open" and let you put content from them on other websites, and others that are "closed" AKA "walled gardens" that will let you post content to them from other sites, but they wont let you pull content from them to other sites.
Yes, the sites in decline or plateauing fit the walled garden category, with Second Life being the most severe walled garden largely due to the bulky client "viewer".
Conversely the sites with the sharpest increases in traffic allow you to easily put content YOU create on their sites on whatever other sites you want. Twitter makes this perhaps easier than any of them.
Again, this is all predicted in "What would Google Do" by Jeff Jarvis, and its interesting to see which companies here need to smarten up, and which ones are the future leaders, so lets just hope for their sake when they do get to the top...they dont forget how they got there, like Mr. Zuckerberg apparently has begun to do.
Run your own analysis for free at Alexa and see how your favorite sites stack up! Just replace the sites in the text boxes with whatever you want for .com and play with the date ranges. Its a very handy, free tool that makes Alexa another big winner in the traffic world. If only the big CEO's would realize, the most honest, open companies will always win in a world where "Free is a business model".
In facebook, it would be great if you could RSS the updates feed, and all the feeds, for that matter, and get the content out from inside the "blue and white utopia" of facebook if we wanted to. Its our content after all right?
Now its interesting that roughly when Twitter sees the spike in their useage is close to just before we saw facebook change its pages and profiles to look almost exactly like twitter's.My purpose in grouping these particular websites is to draw a comparison between sites that are "open" and let you put content from them on other websites, and others that are "closed" AKA "walled gardens" that will let you post content to them from other sites, but they wont let you pull content from them to other sites.
Yes, the sites in decline or plateauing fit the walled garden category, with Second Life being the most severe walled garden largely due to the bulky client "viewer".
Conversely the sites with the sharpest increases in traffic allow you to easily put content YOU create on their sites on whatever other sites you want. Twitter makes this perhaps easier than any of them.
Again, this is all predicted in "What would Google Do" by Jeff Jarvis, and its interesting to see which companies here need to smarten up, and which ones are the future leaders, so lets just hope for their sake when they do get to the top...they dont forget how they got there, like Mr. Zuckerberg apparently has begun to do.
Run your own analysis for free at Alexa and see how your favorite sites stack up! Just replace the sites in the text boxes with whatever you want for .com and play with the date ranges. Its a very handy, free tool that makes Alexa another big winner in the traffic world. If only the big CEO's would realize, the most honest, open companies will always win in a world where "Free is a business model".
In facebook, it would be great if you could RSS the updates feed, and all the feeds, for that matter, and get the content out from inside the "blue and white utopia" of facebook if we wanted to. Its our content after all right?
Monday, April 6, 2009
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Do I have to learn Actionscript 3? Is AS1 outdated?
Actionscript...1,2,3...they're all good! A biased opinion piece from an old hand at flash.
Executive Summary for CEO types:
Actionscript 3 is a good move if your company is large, well funded, and well staffed with low staff turnover. You have a good chunk of your budget put aside for R&D, and another good chunk for training and employee personal development, and process is important. Also customers don;t dictate how to run your company or what you are selling. They just trust you and depend on you to provide them with results and profit.
Actionscript 1/2 are great if you are effectively building your airplane at 30,000 feet or in startup/recovery mode. You constantly have to spin on a dime, retool overnight, and have relatively high staff turnover (staff last less than 5 years on average) and havent really settled into exactly what it is you do. You will make whatever the customer wants and on their schedule. The flexibility and lack of strictness in AS1/2 lend themselves perfectly to this, as well as the short learning curve for new incoming staff.
The essential differences
First of all, AS3 and AS1, while similar in appearance, represent two distinct virtual machines in the flash player. They are about as different as Java, C++, and Pascal are from each other. In fact, to send messages from a VM2 (virtual machine 2 / actionscript 3) to a VM1, you have to invoke the same communication as you would between the flash player and the containing HTML page, or java object or whatever. Suffice it to say, even within the code the two are strange bedfellows sharing the same containing plugin.
History
Actionscript 3 came about because Flash/Adobe are trying to compete with Microsoft and other "big" language platforms so they had to tighten up the rules to play in that space. They did a great job, but, in many ways, they lost the original appeal of flash as a kind of coding "sketchpad" where you could rapidly deploy prototypes, games, and interactivities for one off purposes.
Disadvantages of AS3 (from a business and practical perspective)
First, my personal perspective as a coder...
I have built apps in both languages with equal sophistication. As a coder, I find AS3 far more elegant and fun to work with, its less of a Kludge, and truly object oriented. I really, really like working in it, and I think as I coder I am more useful and "hire-able" being proficient in both.
In the following I will point out the potential pitfalls and objections to moving to Actionscript 3, but only to ensure companies move to the new technology without any misconceptions about the costs and real benefits.
Procedures and Housekeeping
AS3 requires a far stricter process, naming convention, and organizational set of rules and processes to work beyond 1 coder. There is no room for any flexibility in naming conventions, file hierarchy, or even root script file locations. File management is very complicated and requires a lot of housekeeping to keep everything straight. The end result is a cleaner, more scalable and robust product for sure, but if the project is under 2000 lines of code total, the housekeeping can easily outweigh the actual coding in terms of time and resources.
Comparatively, AS1 / Flash is relatively flexible. If a particular bit of code works, but maybe is inelegant or quickly written, the compiler will pass it. in AS3, the compiler is extremely unforgiving so a lot of time is spent finding "bugs" that aren't causing actual problems, but just represent inelegant wording or phrasing according to the compiler. (this is a highly simplified approximation of what is going on...but accurate nonetheless)
In fact, the language is now so complicated, that they had to invent another language called 'flex' that sits on top of it along with a lot of paint by numbers style components, in an attempt to simplify it to decrease the learning curve. Why build an entire set of classes, folders, and establish naming conventions when all you want is a silly banner ad that lets you click a golf club and hit a golf ball into a little hole...?
The converse of this of course is, if you are sufficiently able to reorganize your production team to handle the rigors of AS3, you will be more scaleable and capable as an organization, and ultimately your software will be more robust, and less dependent on one individual's idea of organizing things. This is an expensive thing to affect, can be worth while, and if your company isnt thinking about making software as part of its overall business model, well, thats like being any company that plans to deliver its product with no control over a key part of its supply chain. In short, scalability and process in software development is everyones problem, even if you make concrete tubes.
Stability
VM1 is fast, does most things you need in a production, has 12 years of evolution and bullet proofing behind it, and the VM2 still hasn't proven itself as truly faster than VM1 in all applications...actually in any.
I have also yet to find any instance where the VM2 actually outperforms the VM1 at least from the end user perspective. Certainly the VM2 is faster but the AS3 language demands it has to be. VM2 is, in this way, a bit like Windows Vista. The computers are faster, but the mundane tasks have actually seemed to become much slower because of all the overhead associated with a truly object oriented language.
I don't have any actual VM 1 vs VM 2 developer content statistics to quote, but I'm willing to wager that 90% of the interactive flash content out there is VM1.
Conversely, the best practices required by developers and the stricter language acts like a micro manager whipping your developer work force into shape, which again promotes stability, scalability and reusable code.
Why 90%? Well first of all, I'm not talking about videos. I imagine that easily the statistic for flash video on the web is the other way around, 10% swf and 90% flv/h4. Im talking about interactive flash content, or its primary "raison d'etre". I say 90% because if it was 100% VM1 3 years ago before VM2 came along, my guess is most flash developers at the time tried AS3, couldn't figure out how the document class worked, then went back to flash mx and kept working...then got hit with the recession and said...screw CS..im just sticking with what I know 'cause I gotsta eat.
On the other hand, many developers also tried AS3 in the flash dev, hated it, then tried flex. Flex didn't offer much originally because of the lack of components. Now with a few more components, its more palatable, but any developer who is ultimately responsible for performance of their apps knows that becoming dependant on a plethora of components built by everyone and their dog can lead to a lot of customer support calls that go very bad.
The other choice, VM1, means that you can deploy apps on a tried and true platform quickly and without a lot of housekeeping so you can keep your consulting rate low and know that all the code out there is yours, so you can be responsible for it.
So what exactly can you do in VM2 that you cant do in VM1? Precious few things.
Cool, useful effects
As long as you are publishing in flash player 9 or higher, you have full support of all the filters and transitions offered in the CS Suite of tools. That means blur, drop shadow, transitions everything...all available to you in VM1, although you might have to write in actionscript 2.
Coding Elegance
Actionscript 2 is kind of a kludge compared to AS3, but if you are thinking future, you can write in AS2 in very close in form to AS3, almost indistinguishably in fact.
Neato 3d Components
There are quite a few components built in AS1, but some really interesting 3d ones built for AS3. This is a curious one. Neither VM is as good of a 3d rendering engine as the major ones out there, and Flash will probably always be many years behind the leading 3d rendering engines in terms of physics, ray tracing, procedurals etc...because getting flash to do 3d is like trying to make surgical tools out of bananas...honestly.
Sort of possible but why ?
I ask you to compare Papervision 3d's latest doo hicky to any of the top game titles of today, like Unreal, Half life, Portal, Fallout 3, Bioshock..etc. or even Second life, which is basically a kind of a "platform" sort of. Even Google earth kicks ass over anything 3d in flash, even with the "optimized player". Again, bananas for surgical instruments.
Standalone Applications
With AIR, now you can make desktop applications with installers that run as a standalone in flash! Well, heads up sparky. You've been able to do that with AS1 for many years using programs like Screenweaver. And you can build those without requiring the end user to run a pointless "installer". Just double click the icon and run the program when you want, and when you're not running it, its not pervasively existing in tiny pockets throughout your massive maze of folders in the mysterious c and d drives.
Speed Advantages
Since the VM2 player is, in fact, much faster than VM1 in terms of computations per second etc, you should be able to see marked improvements in high end math applications, working with a lot of children classes that exist and disappear rapidly to form various effects, and procedurals like smoke, water etc. Well, in reality, the VM2, while faster than VM1 for this kind of thing, is still years behind more optimizable code like C++, Java, and processor array specific languages that do the big number crunching that again, flash will never hold a candle to or be practical for. It is fun to play with this, but in the real world business app, not worth investing in the learning curve or the cost of the latest CS4.
Mobile devices and Social Networking apps
Since VM 1 is a smaller, simpler player that ran very well on very slow machines in years past, and netbook computers and cellphones seem to be taking us developers back to those 800mhz days and downgrades to windows XP on the rise in spite of Microsoft dropping support for it, all the new bells and whistles in AS3 may not end up being supportable on the mobile devices. Developers who become dependant on the new components because they couldn't learn to build their own will be stranded until the phones and netbooks can support them.
Even the most successful social networking apps are still very simple, and don't even begin to scratch the surface of what a developer can do in AS1 or 2, so the need for 3 is still a long way off, and at the bleeding edge, if Second Life or some other real 3d engine came into open social, well, the papervision guys would be cut off at the knees over night.
Competing technologies
Microsoft Silverlight, Google Android, and many others compete directly with Flex and Actionscript 3 as platform development tools.
That said, none of the competitors can fit exactly what VM1 does, because that is what flash originally was, and what made it so popular. A very shallow learning curve on a simple app "sketchpad" where you could add fairly decent code to a bunch of pretty good graphics without having to go too code-nerdy with classes and methods and all that weirdness, and could focus on the graphics, animations, and fun stuff. It is an invented niche that flash VM1 still owns. No one else can touch them or compete, and it accounts for 95% of the interactive web games out there still, and they all are running very solidly with no sign of slowing down. Stuff I built in '99 in flash still runs just fine on my vista PC. I never did any updates, never had to rewrite anything. So as a VM1 developer, you essentially have no competing technologies to contend with.
Developing countries
As developing countries come to the table with their massive numbers, developers who have only had access to older flash development environments and definitely cant afford to keep up with Adobe's latest and greatest corporate edicts will again continue pushing out VM1 content for many years to come, and have even less interest in joining the party ranks of Adobe's VM2 crowd.
Business Case and Cost
Even if their developers really want to move to AS3, for flash dependent business there is a heavy price to pay. Some businesses have invested in the VM 1 heavily (whether they realize it or not-many CEO's probably don't) and the cost of moving to VM2 in terms of staff training, turnover, upgrading machines, changing general production policy, etc. may keep them away from it indefinitely, particularly if there is no business case that is compelling enough for them to move over. Trying to explain to a CEO that a number after the letters VM is worth 300,000 in staff turnover and training and platform rebuilding just to keep up with the Joneses when, essentially, it "ain't broke" is a hard sell for any nerdforce.
Adobe itself
Since Adobe managed to come up with "vm2" in the first place, what is stopping them from suddenly creating a "VM3" that only supports "Actionscript 4" and so on. Even though it seems crazy, it is possible that Adobe's head is so far up their own butt that they would actually do this. AS3 is already 3 years old now, VM2 has been around for a while, and devices continue to evolve in strange and unpredictable ways. Adobe has not indicated this sort of plan, but I dont think anyone but the most naive would assume that VM2 is the last of the VM's.
Nevertheless, and I can't stress this enough, as a developer you SHOULD learn AS3, become very good at it as a matter of professional learning. Even if you end up doing most of your work in AS1 or 2, you will be a better coder if you learn 3, and learn it well. It is a lot of fun to work with, and if Adobe is really stupid, may be the only thing you can build for in 2-3 years.
But given the fact that AS1 content constitutes 90% or more of currently being made (not to mention the huge amount of content made over the past 15 years) flash interactive content out there, the idea of Adobe dropping VM1 from the player is extremely unlikely in the foreseeable or even long term future. As VM2 gets bloatier and bloatier with more and more components and add ons, VM1 will remain a small, tight and efficient player that continues to do what it does very well.
Thanks for reading, I hope it helped. Please add your comments and particularly your criticisms below. I cant learn if you dont tell me why Im wrong!
Executive Summary for CEO types:
Actionscript 3 is a good move if your company is large, well funded, and well staffed with low staff turnover. You have a good chunk of your budget put aside for R&D, and another good chunk for training and employee personal development, and process is important. Also customers don;t dictate how to run your company or what you are selling. They just trust you and depend on you to provide them with results and profit.
Actionscript 1/2 are great if you are effectively building your airplane at 30,000 feet or in startup/recovery mode. You constantly have to spin on a dime, retool overnight, and have relatively high staff turnover (staff last less than 5 years on average) and havent really settled into exactly what it is you do. You will make whatever the customer wants and on their schedule. The flexibility and lack of strictness in AS1/2 lend themselves perfectly to this, as well as the short learning curve for new incoming staff.
The essential differences
First of all, AS3 and AS1, while similar in appearance, represent two distinct virtual machines in the flash player. They are about as different as Java, C++, and Pascal are from each other. In fact, to send messages from a VM2 (virtual machine 2 / actionscript 3) to a VM1, you have to invoke the same communication as you would between the flash player and the containing HTML page, or java object or whatever. Suffice it to say, even within the code the two are strange bedfellows sharing the same containing plugin.
History
Actionscript 3 came about because Flash/Adobe are trying to compete with Microsoft and other "big" language platforms so they had to tighten up the rules to play in that space. They did a great job, but, in many ways, they lost the original appeal of flash as a kind of coding "sketchpad" where you could rapidly deploy prototypes, games, and interactivities for one off purposes.
Disadvantages of AS3 (from a business and practical perspective)
First, my personal perspective as a coder...
I have built apps in both languages with equal sophistication. As a coder, I find AS3 far more elegant and fun to work with, its less of a Kludge, and truly object oriented. I really, really like working in it, and I think as I coder I am more useful and "hire-able" being proficient in both.
In the following I will point out the potential pitfalls and objections to moving to Actionscript 3, but only to ensure companies move to the new technology without any misconceptions about the costs and real benefits.
Procedures and Housekeeping
AS3 requires a far stricter process, naming convention, and organizational set of rules and processes to work beyond 1 coder. There is no room for any flexibility in naming conventions, file hierarchy, or even root script file locations. File management is very complicated and requires a lot of housekeeping to keep everything straight. The end result is a cleaner, more scalable and robust product for sure, but if the project is under 2000 lines of code total, the housekeeping can easily outweigh the actual coding in terms of time and resources.
Comparatively, AS1 / Flash is relatively flexible. If a particular bit of code works, but maybe is inelegant or quickly written, the compiler will pass it. in AS3, the compiler is extremely unforgiving so a lot of time is spent finding "bugs" that aren't causing actual problems, but just represent inelegant wording or phrasing according to the compiler. (this is a highly simplified approximation of what is going on...but accurate nonetheless)
In fact, the language is now so complicated, that they had to invent another language called 'flex' that sits on top of it along with a lot of paint by numbers style components, in an attempt to simplify it to decrease the learning curve. Why build an entire set of classes, folders, and establish naming conventions when all you want is a silly banner ad that lets you click a golf club and hit a golf ball into a little hole...?
The converse of this of course is, if you are sufficiently able to reorganize your production team to handle the rigors of AS3, you will be more scaleable and capable as an organization, and ultimately your software will be more robust, and less dependent on one individual's idea of organizing things. This is an expensive thing to affect, can be worth while, and if your company isnt thinking about making software as part of its overall business model, well, thats like being any company that plans to deliver its product with no control over a key part of its supply chain. In short, scalability and process in software development is everyones problem, even if you make concrete tubes.
Stability
VM1 is fast, does most things you need in a production, has 12 years of evolution and bullet proofing behind it, and the VM2 still hasn't proven itself as truly faster than VM1 in all applications...actually in any.
I have also yet to find any instance where the VM2 actually outperforms the VM1 at least from the end user perspective. Certainly the VM2 is faster but the AS3 language demands it has to be. VM2 is, in this way, a bit like Windows Vista. The computers are faster, but the mundane tasks have actually seemed to become much slower because of all the overhead associated with a truly object oriented language.
I don't have any actual VM 1 vs VM 2 developer content statistics to quote, but I'm willing to wager that 90% of the interactive flash content out there is VM1.
Conversely, the best practices required by developers and the stricter language acts like a micro manager whipping your developer work force into shape, which again promotes stability, scalability and reusable code.
Why 90%? Well first of all, I'm not talking about videos. I imagine that easily the statistic for flash video on the web is the other way around, 10% swf and 90% flv/h4. Im talking about interactive flash content, or its primary "raison d'etre". I say 90% because if it was 100% VM1 3 years ago before VM2 came along, my guess is most flash developers at the time tried AS3, couldn't figure out how the document class worked, then went back to flash mx and kept working...then got hit with the recession and said...screw CS..im just sticking with what I know 'cause I gotsta eat.
On the other hand, many developers also tried AS3 in the flash dev, hated it, then tried flex. Flex didn't offer much originally because of the lack of components. Now with a few more components, its more palatable, but any developer who is ultimately responsible for performance of their apps knows that becoming dependant on a plethora of components built by everyone and their dog can lead to a lot of customer support calls that go very bad.
The other choice, VM1, means that you can deploy apps on a tried and true platform quickly and without a lot of housekeeping so you can keep your consulting rate low and know that all the code out there is yours, so you can be responsible for it.
So what exactly can you do in VM2 that you cant do in VM1? Precious few things.
Cool, useful effects
As long as you are publishing in flash player 9 or higher, you have full support of all the filters and transitions offered in the CS Suite of tools. That means blur, drop shadow, transitions everything...all available to you in VM1, although you might have to write in actionscript 2.
Coding Elegance
Actionscript 2 is kind of a kludge compared to AS3, but if you are thinking future, you can write in AS2 in very close in form to AS3, almost indistinguishably in fact.
Neato 3d Components
There are quite a few components built in AS1, but some really interesting 3d ones built for AS3. This is a curious one. Neither VM is as good of a 3d rendering engine as the major ones out there, and Flash will probably always be many years behind the leading 3d rendering engines in terms of physics, ray tracing, procedurals etc...because getting flash to do 3d is like trying to make surgical tools out of bananas...honestly.
Sort of possible but why ?
I ask you to compare Papervision 3d's latest doo hicky to any of the top game titles of today, like Unreal, Half life, Portal, Fallout 3, Bioshock..etc. or even Second life, which is basically a kind of a "platform" sort of. Even Google earth kicks ass over anything 3d in flash, even with the "optimized player". Again, bananas for surgical instruments.
Standalone Applications
With AIR, now you can make desktop applications with installers that run as a standalone in flash! Well, heads up sparky. You've been able to do that with AS1 for many years using programs like Screenweaver. And you can build those without requiring the end user to run a pointless "installer". Just double click the icon and run the program when you want, and when you're not running it, its not pervasively existing in tiny pockets throughout your massive maze of folders in the mysterious c and d drives.
Speed Advantages
Since the VM2 player is, in fact, much faster than VM1 in terms of computations per second etc, you should be able to see marked improvements in high end math applications, working with a lot of children classes that exist and disappear rapidly to form various effects, and procedurals like smoke, water etc. Well, in reality, the VM2, while faster than VM1 for this kind of thing, is still years behind more optimizable code like C++, Java, and processor array specific languages that do the big number crunching that again, flash will never hold a candle to or be practical for. It is fun to play with this, but in the real world business app, not worth investing in the learning curve or the cost of the latest CS4.
Mobile devices and Social Networking apps
Since VM 1 is a smaller, simpler player that ran very well on very slow machines in years past, and netbook computers and cellphones seem to be taking us developers back to those 800mhz days and downgrades to windows XP on the rise in spite of Microsoft dropping support for it, all the new bells and whistles in AS3 may not end up being supportable on the mobile devices. Developers who become dependant on the new components because they couldn't learn to build their own will be stranded until the phones and netbooks can support them.
Even the most successful social networking apps are still very simple, and don't even begin to scratch the surface of what a developer can do in AS1 or 2, so the need for 3 is still a long way off, and at the bleeding edge, if Second Life or some other real 3d engine came into open social, well, the papervision guys would be cut off at the knees over night.
Competing technologies
Microsoft Silverlight, Google Android, and many others compete directly with Flex and Actionscript 3 as platform development tools.
That said, none of the competitors can fit exactly what VM1 does, because that is what flash originally was, and what made it so popular. A very shallow learning curve on a simple app "sketchpad" where you could add fairly decent code to a bunch of pretty good graphics without having to go too code-nerdy with classes and methods and all that weirdness, and could focus on the graphics, animations, and fun stuff. It is an invented niche that flash VM1 still owns. No one else can touch them or compete, and it accounts for 95% of the interactive web games out there still, and they all are running very solidly with no sign of slowing down. Stuff I built in '99 in flash still runs just fine on my vista PC. I never did any updates, never had to rewrite anything. So as a VM1 developer, you essentially have no competing technologies to contend with.
Developing countries
As developing countries come to the table with their massive numbers, developers who have only had access to older flash development environments and definitely cant afford to keep up with Adobe's latest and greatest corporate edicts will again continue pushing out VM1 content for many years to come, and have even less interest in joining the party ranks of Adobe's VM2 crowd.
Business Case and Cost
Even if their developers really want to move to AS3, for flash dependent business there is a heavy price to pay. Some businesses have invested in the VM 1 heavily (whether they realize it or not-many CEO's probably don't) and the cost of moving to VM2 in terms of staff training, turnover, upgrading machines, changing general production policy, etc. may keep them away from it indefinitely, particularly if there is no business case that is compelling enough for them to move over. Trying to explain to a CEO that a number after the letters VM is worth 300,000 in staff turnover and training and platform rebuilding just to keep up with the Joneses when, essentially, it "ain't broke" is a hard sell for any nerdforce.
Adobe itself
Since Adobe managed to come up with "vm2" in the first place, what is stopping them from suddenly creating a "VM3" that only supports "Actionscript 4" and so on. Even though it seems crazy, it is possible that Adobe's head is so far up their own butt that they would actually do this. AS3 is already 3 years old now, VM2 has been around for a while, and devices continue to evolve in strange and unpredictable ways. Adobe has not indicated this sort of plan, but I dont think anyone but the most naive would assume that VM2 is the last of the VM's.
Nevertheless, and I can't stress this enough, as a developer you SHOULD learn AS3, become very good at it as a matter of professional learning. Even if you end up doing most of your work in AS1 or 2, you will be a better coder if you learn 3, and learn it well. It is a lot of fun to work with, and if Adobe is really stupid, may be the only thing you can build for in 2-3 years.
But given the fact that AS1 content constitutes 90% or more of currently being made (not to mention the huge amount of content made over the past 15 years) flash interactive content out there, the idea of Adobe dropping VM1 from the player is extremely unlikely in the foreseeable or even long term future. As VM2 gets bloatier and bloatier with more and more components and add ons, VM1 will remain a small, tight and efficient player that continues to do what it does very well.
Thanks for reading, I hope it helped. Please add your comments and particularly your criticisms below. I cant learn if you dont tell me why Im wrong!
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