Future of interactivity — will open standards fall in the face of Flash?

Adobe (and before them Macromedia) have long had a vision of Flash everywhere — in mobile phones; on set top boxes; and, of course, computers.  I’ve never been a give fan of Flash, given its proprietary origins and I’ve had some truly terrible integration experiences with extremely high CPU load.  It seems to me that Flash suffers from many of the same problems that early versions of many interpreted languages (Java, PHP) have — poorly written code that the optimizer has a hard time figuring out.  Think of PHP before Zend or Java before Hotspot.  Where are these products for the Flash ecosystem?  Will Adobe allow their existence or foster their growth?

I had been thinking that Blu-ray and BDLive would lead us out of this morass with an open system for interactivity.  However, it seems that the title authors have been slow to leverage this technology.  Now I read recent announcements from Adobe, http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200904/042009FlashDigitalHome.html, that references many of the industry interests — content, distribution, silicon, software, operators — giving support for a Flash-based system that can be embedded in players (set top boxes, disc players).  I, like Cactus Jack, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nance_Garner, don’t give too much credence to press release quotes as they lack any real commitment.  However, in this release, I find the support from Sigma Designs to be particularly telling.  If Sigma is going this route, that could dictate the universe for both packaged and electronically distributed media in terms of interaction.  Bye-bye freedom of choice and innovation.  This could be PostScript all over again.

Perhaps I’m a bit of a dinosaur with all this open source, free-as-in-freedom, ideology.  The time for religous wars about this stuff is long over and I stopped bleeding in six colors or any other way over a decade ago.  I’m on the lookout now for what the title developers do.  If BD’s start coming with Flash, I’ll tip my hat to the new revolution (thanks Pete).  But that supposes that BD’s continue to matter.  And that’s a topic for another day…

Book Review: ME 2.0 by Dan Schawbel — read the blog instead

Just finished reading ME 2.0, http://personalbrandingbook.com/.  As the Author says, it’s by a millennial for millennials — of which I am not one.  For someone who is about 20 years older than the author, I found the overall tone of the book that of discovering the obvious but intermixed with some great insights as to how it applies to the author personally and some tips and tricks on using the current generation of tools.  I would have preferred less personal narrative about how smart the author is and more study of general branding techniques — such as how to develop your personal brand, which I felt was covered rather thinly.  The book is bit more of a motivator and less of a cookbook or guide.

Weaknesses aside, I found several gems in the book.  One being a tip on setting privacy settings on Facebookthat I immediately used to help my daughter with her account.  I also read several passages to my kids to help them understand social networking better which the author presents very accurately and clearly.

Dan Schawbel is a very talented writer and the book is a quick read.  As you closer to the back though it bogs down in ever increasing branding of Dan Schawbel.  I started to feel a bit hoodwinked by the end — like the author wasn’t so much telling me about personal branding as he was showing me his personal brand.

That’s okay… overall the book helped rekindle my interest and use of social media and did give me some concrete tidbits to more formally think about and develop my personal brand.   Posting to this blog is part of it! 

Take the book on a weekend read or plane ride, but bring something else too as you’ll finish it quickly.  Read Dan Schawbel’s blog http://www.personalbrandingblog.wordpress.com/ or follow him on twitter — both of those resources are excellent resources on personal branding and will lead you to many more.

I passed the book along and am recommending it to my friends’ kids as the come out of college and don’t know what to do.  As for those older, my recommendation is to think about and work on your personal brand, but perhaps look for other resources.