Social media for the Paranoid

Steve Jobs cares about cross-platform development tools. Yes, really, alot.  it is just that he is hiding it behind his concerns about using Adobe Flash to play videos, which he outlined in his Thoughts on Flash, which actually created a kerfuffle. The irony is that the days of using Flash for video are numbered without Steve’s input because the technology has been surpassed (by HTML 5 if you really want to know), and the decline can clearly be seen in graphs produced by Encoding.com,  who does alot of video encoding (basically making the stuff small enough to put on the web).

The real news here is not the use of Flash to play media, but to use another Adobe product called “Adobe Air” to create applications that can run inside a web browser (such as the one you are using now) or as an application on a range of operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Apple OS10, and some flavours of Linux. It could potentially run on some mobile phones as well.

If Adobe Air is successful then Operating System vendors have much less of lock on developers because the application developer can create their magic largely independently of the underlying platform. Not good news if you own the underlying platform – hence Mr Job’s change in license for access to the inner guts (known as the SDK) for Apple development – that says “No private APIs” – which really means “don’t put a condom on – nothing between you and me baby”.

So cross platform development tools have been around for a long time – Java is a good example. So why care now? Well because they make it very easy to produce very sexy applications very quickly, and they are not as sluggish as they used to be. Some examples are the New York Times Reader 2.0, and Tweetdeck. These run on all the desktop operating systems.

So what about Microsoft? Why are they not barking? Well they don’t need to. They have developed a competitor to Adobe Air called “Silverlight” which has the advantage for Windows Developers that it is just the same as developing a normal Windows application. So they leave Adobe to create the noise, while they try and catchup with them.

What will happen to Apple? Well iPhone sales are running at three times that of the Apple Mac. But Apple OSX has 2.37% of the US operating system market while Windows 7 now has 7.57% of that market in just six months of sales. So you simply can not afford to ignore the big dog, Microsoft if you are developing applications for desktops.

For the mobile phone the game has not started, Microsoft does not have Android or iPhone support – but then neither does Adobe yet. So the iPhone is pretty much the only rich mobile development environment in town.

But, come the dog days of next summer I believe that the fight will be Adobe versus Microsoft – not Apple versus Adobe.

Social Media can easily become an addiction, and like all addictions heavy users look for easier ways to get their “high, and casual users are completely bemused by the paraphernalia that the heavy users grows to rely upon.

The reality is that we are having simultaneous conversations with more and more people in parallel, and those conversations are getting shorter and shorter, and more and more frequent. They are also getting alot more public, with people happy to share every detail of their lives with their “friends” and strangers. The tools are evolving to match this trend – making older tools look positively lethargic.

So as you can tell from the length of my postings so far, I am a long way from the 140 character “hit”, but I could not resist seeing what life would be like if I lived it on Tweetdeck – probably the most well known of the SNS authoring tools. Then I could not resist trying Flock, which bills itself as the world’s first social media browser. In between all these experiments I answered my email using Microsoft Outlook, and surfed the web using Flock.

I started out really confused – once you have Tweetdeck setup to monitor a variety of search terms and user status messages on a couple of social networks, you have got yourself a massively noisy piece of software. At random intervals there are competing popup messages that jump in front of everything – like three years olds on a sugar high at the birthday party. Each one screaming “me, me, me” and demanding cake or a bathroom break. Like three year olds, you have to pretty quickly triage them into “about to leak – from either end” and anything else. Alas Tweetdeck does not allow you to set particular alarms and triggers, so pretty soon I became overwhelmed and went off to look for a place to hide.

Just like a kid’s birthday party where you feel cut off from the real world, you feel the same thing with Tweetdeck. The application is a window into the Social Networking world – but only for your fingers. If you want to connect to any other application on the desktop, you are basically out of luck. Yes you can click a link and have it launch a webpage, but anything more than that, like printing or saving to a file, is totally beyond it.

Flock is a far calmer place. Familiar to those of us who still need more that the screen of a mobile phone in order to communicate. Its like a street party – everything is pretty familiar but there are alot of people around, who drift in and out of conversations. None of the flash and excitement – none of the noises when a message arrives, nor the pop-ups. It is really a web browser – and that provides the familiarity.

Then there is Outlook. Outlook is like a pint of Guinness in the pub. Drawn slowly, there is plenty of time to reflect upon the feeling as the foam kisses your lips and the dark, cold, liquid flows in. One pint at a time. Remember to order the next before you finish the one you have, as bad things happen when you hurry the barman. Long slow conversations with one or two people around you. No hurry, no interruptions – except for the regular trip to “see a man about a dog”. Outlook is exactly the same. One email at a time – you work your way down the list of new emails. Don’t hurry the application, or else you will get a glass of foam. Don’t ask to see other emails by the same person, or on the same topic unless you too are planning a long leisurely trip to the bathroom. But plenty of time to draft the reply. In fact all the time and space to write an entire novel in response. Then attach a Powerpoint presentation for good measure, schedule a meeting, and make a note to buy some leeks.

So what do I conclude? Well the future looks alot more like a kids birthday party than it does an afternoon in an Irish pub. While Tweetdeck probably does not need to add email functionality – Outlook certainly does need to switch from Guinness to vodka shots. Both need to tie more tightly with a web browser. And Flock? You would think that it was in the ideal place, and perhaps when the next generation of web browser technology appears it will, but for now it can’t match the flash and sizzle of Adobe Air (or Microsoft Silverlight) that power Tweetdeck and its competitors.

So go on – download Tweetdeck and play with it for a day. I guarantee you will come away with icecream down your shirt, crumbs on your lap, and a strong desire for a quiet walk in the woods…. after you have taken your kids to the bathroom for a leak.