2 More Predictions for Rich Internet Applications

Echoing Ryan Stewart's great post 10 Predictions for Rich Internet Applications in 2007, I thought I'd add two more that I think deserve to be on the list. Mine are bit less, "technology used to build them" oriented, but still pretty major:

1: Cut a Hole In a Box

haha just joking....



11: RIA's in the living room

With the pending release of the Opera Browser for the Nintendo Wii tomorrow, we may a surge of Rich Internet Applications appear on the scene, adapted for the Wii. Playsation 3 is also exploring this concept of browsing the web on TV.

With the state of the web right now (Web 2.0 services), and the pending exposion of Rich Internet Applications, mixed with the ability to deliver these applications into the living room, I believe that this is the biggest opportunity of all. YouTube could be poised to replace traditional television completely!

Try and think of all the other web services that could be amazing delivered over a browser on the Wii....:

Youtube
Flickr
etc.... (must I run down the entire list? You get the idea)

Man, it is an amazing thought.



12: Branded Applications/Branded Utility

In 2007 I believe that the marketing industry and major brands will start to understand and take advantage of the Rich Internet Application.

The majority of great RIA's now are developed by companies providing services in which the service is the core of their business, making the RIA the core of their business.

In the next year major brands will catch onto the success of Rich Internet Applications and leverage them to build brand loyalty by empowering digital lifestyle.

Apple and Nike have already done this with the Tune Your Run project.

I believe that you will see many more popular brands trying to become part of your life, just like most of the Web 2.0 companies are doing, and they will use Rich Internet Applications as a way to do it, to become more useful to you personally.

PSFK has been running some very interesting conversation around the Branded Utility topic as of late.

More Finetune Update Details

Mykel from Finetune has just posted on many of the new features added to the service.

Finetune Service Updated

The Finetune music service has been updated.

The service adds a tonne of new things, including:

- Embedded Player paramaters (including autoplay)
- Embedding Artist Radio
- Fingerprints
- New commenting and discussion on artists
- and much more!

Below is a little sample of my Artist Radio embedded:




If you look at the player I embedded on the right, you will see that artist radio is also available in the drop down. That player starts up though by selecting a random playlist of mine instead of starting on the artist radio selection screen.


Embedding Your Artist Radio:

1 - In order to get your artists to appear you have to search for artists on Finetune.com and state that you are a fan of that artist. This in turn adds that artist to your favourite artists collection.

2 - Go to your main profile page and click the link called EMBED PROFILE this will give you the code to embed a player like I have on the right of this page. It will select one of your playlists at random and present it for listening.

3 - If you look at the resulting embedded player, you will see it now has a dropdown in the top left. This dropdown will allow you to select your other playlists, or go to your artist radio chooser.


Extra Parameters!:

The new embedded players have lots of new options available to them, but the UI on Finetune.com has not yet exposed them. This will be coming in the near future. However, if you want to play with a few:

The basic embed code for my player has the traditional url and flashvars.the pinst var is the id of your embedded player, add the following for special functionality:


Autoplay:

?pinst=BADE31914DD8436E83D001E5C4F3D7CA&autoplay=true

Start on Artist Radio:

?pinst=BADE31914DD8436E83D001E5C4F3D7CA&state=artist



More cool stuff coming on this in the near future!




We are still working out some kinks as this rolls out, but if you are a Finetune member, you should go and take a look at what has changed.

More Free Music Done the Wrong Way.

I came across this post about another service competing with Finetune:

Zero Paid : on Radio Blog Club

I checked out the service, and to my surprise, they are getting away with the same implementation as Pandora!:

Here is a previous post I wrote about this regarding Pandora

With Radio Blog Club, you can also use a HTTP sniffer like Tamper Data for Firefox, find the url to the .rbs file, download it directly and change it to an mp3 extension, and blam there you go. Free music straight up.

So how do these guys and Pandora get away with this security flaw? In the past college students were charged for sharing music using file sharing programs somewhat privately, yet companies that are publicly giving music away for free on the web aren't facing the same scrutiny.

Puzzling?

PSFK : Gabor Vida on Branded Applications

Gabor Vida gets interviewed at PSFK regarding the topic of Branded Applications:

http://www.psfk.com/2006/12/branded_utility.html



Gab started coining this term over the last year, as he saw our work on the application development and the marketing sides start merging into the same thing.

Branded Utility has been the big topic of discussion on PSFK as of late, and it is awesome to see Gab in there contributing to the discussion.

In our own Flash Platform echo chambers we tend to focus on technology first, but the people from PSFK come from the marketing side. Gab, while being in the know from the Engagement Platform side of things, is really a marketer first. It is profound to see marketers become interested in the Engagement Platform as a way to build brand<>consumer relationships.

The conversations on PSFK are something that our community of technologists should begin to pay more attention to.

Get in with the parents!

It isn't often that I evangelize for something other than the Flash Platform. There is something out there though that I have evangelized, and have built up quite a little following for. The thing in question in the Slingbox

Being a big hockey fan, I always use it to watch games when I am on the road traveling , or if I am at work. Recently, my girlfriend's father was over and I showed it to him. He thought it was really cool, so I got one and set it up for him:



This is him and his brother in Florida (where they live for the winter) enjoying a Senators game in their condo. Talk about getting in the good books! They love it, and now a few other members of her family want me to set one up for them.

Makes a great Xmas present!

Free Music - The wrong way!

So it seems you can actually get full mp3 files for free from Pandora!:

Download MP3 files from Pandora

I just loaded up a station, and used the Firefox extension called Tamper Data to see the calls out to the files. I was able to just freely download them!

This can't be a good thing for one of the market leaders in this space, and this article is on page 2 of Digg right now.