Ryan Merket’s Blog

TechCrunch just announced Adobe TV. An Adobe AIR application that allows users to search for content and interact with it. Users can watch shows in 1080p, 720p or 480i resolutions, respectively.

This is a HUGE blow to services such as Hulu, and Joost. As these players were looking to be the first HD compatible streaming video destination site, Adobe comes in and releases a web app for the desktop, thus eliminating the “destination” part of the equation.

I think you are going to see a huge shift away from destination sites and more to web based desktop apps running on platforms similar to AIR.

TechCrunch just announced that Facebook will be releasing instant messaging functionality. The instant messaging will be on the Jabber open source platform, thus allowing services such as Gtalk, Adium (Apple), and Trillian (Windows) to be compatible. As soon as there are screenshots available I will post them.

This is huge news, and something that will most likely affect my productivity level. So, here’s to me uninstalling Adium at work.

A few years ago there was a handful of Myspace utilities that allowed people to easily send friend requests, mass message people, mass comment on people’s profiles, and perform a number of other automated actions. Some people think that these tools brought havoc to the user’s real social graph, as we know it, to Myspace.

No longer are you friends with real friends, but you start to get strange friend requests from scantily dressed women, men you have never met before, and garage bands pimping their demo they recorded on a 4 track via their Myspace profile. Spam.

Now, from the makers of one of these very popular spam utilities comes FoxAdder.com.

FoxAdder is the fastest & fully featured Facebook Bot geared to help you effectively advertise, market, and promote your website, products, music & more on Facebook - the worlds largest social networking site.

If Facebook can’t keep up with these “bots”, and they start to gain traction among marketers, you will see a dramatic loss of engagement as users start searching for a network that Facebook was. A true social graph, walled from explicit spam.

WeekendApps is a full weekend event to get developers and entrepreneurs together to build and release Facebook applications in one weekend. We want to help you build hugely successful Facebook applications that grow virally and reach millions of users. Our goal is to assist entrepreneurs to reach their potential, launch their startups, and achieve massive success. We will do that by (also, check our Schedule & Activities):

• Brining in entrepreneurs and developers who have built hugely successful applications to share their secrets.
• We will have a team of awesome designers, marketers, usability experts, and lawyers available to you to help you and answer your questions.
• We’re partnering with the great folks at The Enterprise Network to lend their guidance and support to you for free during the weekend.
• We’re planning an ad-exchange network to get applications to promote each other and overcome the initial challenge of reaching the first 10,000 users.
• We’ll have all teams share their experiences so we can learn from each others successes and mistakes.

I plan on attending and participating in this event. If anyone is interested in having little ol’ me in their team please drop me a line!

At some point when developing, you most always hit some type of road block in the development process. When that happens and you forget how to use Google, someone out there has your back. Meet, webdevelopersfieldguide.com, people who searched Google and found the answer to your more than likely FAQ.

So in those desperate moments where everything has escaped you, even the Google toolbar seems to have been lost, try to muster enough memory juice to pull the Web Developer’s Field Guide up and leave the searching to the experts.

/end

[just a bunch of cool links]

Myspace announced their new application developer platform tonight with semi-locked down event in San Francisco They gave everyone on the RSVP list a free Flip Video Camera and a bag full of other shwag.

After looking through the developer site, I have some serious concerns with the Myspace platform. For one, developers don’t get to host their own code. You have to copy/paste your JavaScript (that’s right, no PHP, ASP.NET, JAVA unless you want to AJAX everything) into a textarea box and submit it to Myspace. Ghetto. Developers want to have the freedom and reign to develop on their own machines, using their tools and have the reassurance of their servers reliability. I for one have seen Myspace go through some major scalability nightmares and downtime issues in the past; not sure that I want my application on those same servers.

The second thing is that the UI is still, well, Myspace. Everything about the design is still very much so — Myspace. I don’t know any other way to put it, it’s just bad. It’s hard to make your Web 2.0 applications look good in a Web 1.0 surrounding.

All in all I am going to have to give Myspace a 9 for shwag, and a low 5 for impressiveness of their platform.

Ask500People.com lets you ask a question to, well, 500 people. As you enter the homepage the homepage you are presented a map and a question. As people start answering the question the map scrolls to where they are in the world, and the answer they gave. It is VERY well done, and a great testament to the power of social web applications. Give it a spin.

Great inspiration piece. I found it at ffffound.com. I’m not sure who the designer is or when it was made. So if you know anything about it please leave a comment and enlighten me.

NBC announced their video download site, but they forgot one thing — other browsers and operating systems. Huge mistake.

Hey NBC, I hate to break it to you but not everyone uses Windows or Internet Explorer 6. Smooth move.

How do they ever expect to compete with iTunes when they are not even hitting Apple’s own market? If NBC really wanted to hit Apple where it hurts, they would encode all their videos in the new Flash video (H.264), give away the videos free to steal Apple’s market, and offer tools to convert the videos to the iPod. Do that for a few months and then slowly introduce monetization.

Instead, what NBC has is the Apple faithful rolling their eyes at their attempt at online video and Apple laughing hysterically.

Google has confirmed that there is no way to authenticate users on non-Google containers, thus allowing spoofing of accounts to occur, and people with the right amount of knowledge can hack OpenSocial to take over others applications.

Now, can someone please explain why Google, the world’s most successful internet company, with the smartest engineers, largest IPO, and at a time when they seem unstoppable, release a product that has MAJOR security breaches? Why would they let such  a product out and why do it with a ‘campfire’, media blitz, blog rollouts, and press conferences?

Is Google scared of something? What is it that Facebook has that everyone feels like they need to partner together on to compete?

Stay close to Facebook for now, even Google is having a hard time creating a platform to compete with Facebook’s.