Web Trends

After reading an intriguing highlight of a new piece of software called Flypaper on CNET this morning, I had to take a test drive of a free version of this do-it-yourself Flash production studio.

The reasoning behind the product is simple — Flash is complicated to use, forcing businesses who want the kind of rich multimedia presentations only possible in Flash to hire a professional Flash developer. The question is whether there is a critical need in the marketplace for more Flash animations, especially by amateurs DIYers who lack the technical expertise to use the core Flash tools.

One CNET commenter summed up my initial reservations:

The client buys a finished production … or they can buy a handy cam and shoot it themselves. We don’t have a problem with this, because we know that the next time they want to do a video production, or a Flash animation, they’ll come back to someone who knows how to do it right.

And there you have it. Just as Dreamweaver does not a web coder make, so Flypaper does not a skilled and creative multimedia producer make.

That said, it is a pretty cool piece of software that in the right hands has a lot of potential. I just worry that it won’t stay in the right hands.

Let me put it another way.

Flypaper is designed for standalone presentations and NOT for Flash pieces meant to be on the web.

I can’t stress this enough. I have a terrible feeling in my gut that dozens of businesses are going to grab onto this tool and have Sally in accounting whip up a template-based website using the software, and feel that if they plop it up online they are destined for success.

No, no, no!

BUT… Say you want something that looks a little, shall I say, “Flashier” than your traditional Powerpoint for your next business meeting. Now you may be in luck.

Flypaper (Free, at least — I didn’t test the pro version) does make it astonishingly easy to make complicated Flash animations based on a stockpile of templates, with a lot of customization available for people who want to get their hands as dirty as this software will allow.

This is very much a Powerpoint-inspired piece of software, and as easy as it is to start dragging and dropping things, it’ll be well worth the time to understand how actions and animations all go together. Ten minutes into it, you’ll soon discover that there’s a lot more you can in Flash than in Powerpoint.

I’m curious to see how this product starts to get used and by whom. The analytics and CRM features available on the Pro and Enterprise versions will doubtless attract fans in the business world, though again doubt clouds my mind — if you’re not willing to pay to have a professional develop a multimedia piece for you, do you really want your customers looking at it?

Flypaper is definitely cool. I just worry that it’s powerful enough to be dangerous.

Gosh, I hate to be another one jumping on the Cuil-bashing train this morning, but it’s just too easy a target.

What is Cuil, you ask? Well, for a glowing review, see the New York Times. For something more sardonic, you can go here, here, or here.

Personally, I’m holding out for more information, and I welcome any competition to the realm of web search — it makes our job more fun and opens up new ways for our customers to reach their customers online.

And heck, I like the fact that we come up #2 for “Maine Web Design” :

… Though admittedly, coming up at #6 is The Freaky Bean Coffee House, which has much more to do with delicious handmade mocha grandes than HTML.

And even more laughably, at the bottom of the first page, maybe #12 or so (I do like how Cuil spins off from the traditional list of ten blue links), you see a link to the “Quoddy Loop–Lubec, Trescott & Whiting, Maine.” A fine, fine area of the state (in fact I went to the 2-room school house that’s mentioned in the by-line), but again… not really the cutting edge of web design.

So yeah, I’m in the same boat as the rest, skeptical of the launch but very open-minded about the future. Let’s just hope that it gets “Cuiler” in the future.

Morgan Stanley has just revealed last month’s Internet Trends Report which has some very intriguing statistics regarding Social Networking sites.

Here are some of the highlights from the 72 page document:

• 6 out of the TOP 10 Most visited sites on the Internet ARE Social Networking sites. YouTube, Facebook, Hi5, Live.com, MySpace and Wikipedia all made the list.
• 5 out of the 6 didn’t even make the list in 2005. Within 3 years our internet experience has been drastically changed by the introduction of social media, networking and sharing sites.
• in 2008 YouTube has surpassed Google and Yahoo in number of Page Views
• Facebook has grown by 305% - largely in part to it’s ’stickiness’, open application platform, and recent open invitation strategy.
• Top 5 Facebook Applications are: Superwall, Top Friends, FunWall, SuperPoke and Movies.
• Top 5 Searches according to Google Zeitegist: iPhone, Badoo, Facebook, Daily Motion & Webkinz.
• Amazon.com is still the Largest Online Retailer
• Internet Advertising spend is up 26% making it the biggest advertising mover.
• 80% of Internet Users deem the internet as an important source of information, where as radio and newspaper only received 63% importance.

View the full Morgan Stanley Internet Trend Report:

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Already unique in the way it aggregates news stories from multiple sources and offers them in customizable RSS and Atom feeds, Google News took another bold step in the way it presents the news with the announcement that story participants will be able to comment on stories about them in the near future.

As the Natural Search Blog points out, the most interesting people to hear from in stories — publicly-owned, major companies — will likely not take up the opportunity to use this new feature. Caution is the better part of PR for most major companies, and the hurdles to drafting an accepted public statement may well make the story well over and done with before any comment is ever posted.

While as of today (almost a week after the announcement) a visit to the Google News homepage doesn’t show any stories tagged with the new feature, I think the move is very forward-thinking on Google’s part and should disintegrate the producer/consumer, story/subject lines that as a whole are under attack by Web 2.0. Now it’s just a matter of seeing exactly who’ll comment using the new system.