This is exciting and helps to encourage us to keep going with the weekly events and adding more useful features to the hashtagsocialmedia.com website.

If you have not had a chance to participate in one of our weekly twitter discussions, we invite you to join the conversation every Tuesday at noon. Head over to hashtagsocialmedia.com for more details and an archive of all previous events.

JUDGE COMMENTS

“This is a super site, and one I will definitely give more time outside the awards. You all did a very effective job and making it easy and informative.”

“Great job on forefronting the idea!”

Thank you Judges!

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If you have not heard his thoughts you can catch up on why Apple does not support flash here:

The problem is this:

Flash is currently the go to application for immersive online animation and interaction. Millions, maybe billions have been spent over the past decade on creating high-end flash animated websites. Developers don’t use flash because it is the greatest/easiest application to build in and use. Web developers use Flash because it is the best option we have. Flash is installed on over 90% of all desktop computers including macs. This means Flash is the best option we have and almost anyone on a computer will be able to view the content.

So Flash is the best option we have for animation/interaction and Apple is not going to support it. This would not matter except that iPhone use is growing faster than any other mobile device and with the resale of the iPad Apple is capturing even more market share. Apple is estimated to sell 9 million iPads in 2010 alone.

So We have a whole bunch of existing flash websites and A quickly growing market share of deveices that do not support flash.

The Problem gets worse.

As mentioned above companies have spent an enormous amount of money on flash software and high end websites. Steve Jobs has been heard telling major publishers like Wall Street Journal that flash is a dying technology and that dropping it would be an almost insignificant effort.  If major publishers follow his words the result will be a fabricated trend away from a competent software.

Steve Jobs is forcing a trend that is not good for businesses and not good for consumers.

Don’t get me wrong, Flash and Adobe company in general is no saint. Their software, business practices and pricing model are nearly as bad as Apple. But we’ll save that rant for later. This discussion is about Flash software and consumers /business use.

Why Won’t Apple support Flash on mobile devices?

Many consumers, analysts and tech gurus have all posited ideas on the obviously gaping hole left by excluding  flash on apple mobile devices. Fortunately  Steve Jobs wrote up his list of reasons for excluding the Flash platfom. You can read the full details here.

Here is bullet list of his reasons:

• Flash is not an open technology
• Reliability, Security, Perfomance
• Battery Life
• Touch interaction
• Results in sub-standard apps

Each one of these points is valid.  However they are also completely irrelevant.

• Flash is not an open technology – True, who cares? it works and has worked successfully for years.  Since when does Apple care about open? You can’t install OSX on any computer but an apple computer, you can’t release software for the iPhone/iPad without first paying to join their developer program and then getting approval to release the application. So Apple only cares about “Open” when it suits their needs?
• Reliability Security and Performance – This argument doesn’t make any sense at all. They are arguing that the security, relaibility and performance of a software that does not exist is not good enough. It doesn’t exist! How would you know? If you are basing this off of the desktop software then why on earth do you support it on your desktop computers and laptops? This argument does not add up.
• Battery Life – Agreed, Flash animation burns batteries faster than no animation. But so does video, So do touch screens, so do sliding animated home screens. The truth is, the consumer should be able to decide whether they run flash and suffer the short battery life if they choose.
• Touch interaction – Agreed, Touch interaction just doesn’t make sense with flash. Flash accommodates mouse rollovers and mouse clicks. There is no such thing as a roll-over on a touch device just a dragging. However, let’s keep in mind… this is not a limitation of flash, this is more like a limitation of iPhone OS operating system. The truth is Flash supports something, something that has been very popular, and iPhone OS does not. Again the consumer should be able to make the choice to experience limited rollovers or not. (JavaScript drop down navigations operate off of roll-overs too, Apple didn’t exclude javascript)

• Software built on third party cross platform IDE result in sub-standard apps – This is nonsense. First, there is already a ton of subpar apps on itunes – there are a dozen iFart apps out there built on the iPhone SDK. You can’t get more substandard than that. More interestingly, Steve jobs recommends that Adobe focus their efforts creating software that produces cross platform HTML5 apps. Kind of a contradiction of this very argument.

The real reasons Apple is excluding Flash from iPhone OS

1. Money$ – In part, Apple is operating in the old fashion manner of maximizing shareholder wealth. If they keep flash off of  the iphone, they keep an entire world of free Flash games off your mobile device. Steve Jobs recommends that you simply download games from itunes instead. Of which, Apple will receive a percentage of the sale.
2. Touch interaction – Apple simply has not figured out how to accommodate roll over effects versus the drag effect.. The fact that JavaScript drop down navigations do not work properly is living proof of this short coming.
3. Vendetta – Apple and Adobe have a number of products that directly compete (Lightroom vs. Apertures, Premier vs. Final Cut, etc…). It is rumored that Steve Jobs has always resented that so many people that use Apple computers rely on Adobe software to get their job done… OK this is rumor but it certainly makes the story more interesting

Why is this bad?

• Apple is flagrantly limiting competition, they are likely going to go down the same road as Microsoft fighting antitrust lawsuit after antitrust lawsuit until some one finally decides to make an example of them. It took about a decade before the courts finally made an example out of Microsoft, so Apple probably has some time.
• The consumer suffers – We as consumers suffer because we can not load a flash website on our $500 phones. We get a limited experience. For example, if I want to purchase tickets to a local movie theater on my iPad, i can’t, because the movie theater has an excellent flash powered checkout and seat reservation system
• Companies will have to spend a fortune converting to HTML5,… and they really won’t get much out of it.
• Developers have yet another challenge to try to overcome – There are already tons of “standards” inconsistencies between different browsers, this just makes it worse

What should Apple do?

• Plain and Simple, Apple should give users the choice to turn Flash on and off. I am thinking of something similar to the way a user can turn on and off the “Airplane Mode”. If a consumer wants limited battery life in return for more utility of the device, so be it. This would at least get us over the hump of flash being phased out…if Flash gets phased out.
• Offer a viable alternative - Apple says to use H.264 and HTML5 for embedding video and this makes great sense. However they did not say what to do when you want to create an animated experience that integrates video and animated interaction . HTML5 can do some of this well, but if we tried to convert a flash website for lets’s say a car manufacturer like Honda to HTML5, the majority of internet users would not be able to render it with out crashing their browser.

What should we, as website owners do?

Unfortunately there is no right or wrong answer right now. All We can do is wait and see and evaluate each web project on a case by case basis. It seems that apple is going to continue to take the majority of the mobile market and if that is the way of the future we will need to stop including flash. Unfortunately it will take years before this shakes out.

A couple guesses about the future.

I really don’t think flash is going anywhere for a long while. Eventually HTML5 may take over as the preferred solution but that is years away. It will take developers a couple years to see the benefits and adopt HTML5 on a large scale and many years after for existing sites to be rebuilt with up to date standards.

In the meantime Apple is leaving a BIG hole in it’s competitive armor. Google is really close to having a phone that is equally powerful and they are eager to include flash.

I beleive that Apple will eventually be pressured to include flash either through legal obligation or competitive necessity. In the meantime I’ll be spending my time surfing iTunes for a new app.

Hosting Platform

Last year we were plagued by server and hosting issues causing the site to crash too often whenever traffic would spike. There is nothing wrong with this particular host. They just were not the right tool for the job and as our demands grew they just could not keep up. It happens.

In January We moved out Hosting over to Media Temple and it has been a huge improvement. So far we have not exceeded our resources even during our busiest events without affecting the site performance.

New Twitter Integration

A few new Twitter features and a few more to come:

• Twitter sign in through  Oauth
  • Users can now sign in through Oauth on our Live page or any of the event pages. This will let users Follow and favorite and participate in events directly from hashtagsocialmedia.com

• Filtering the #socialmedia noise
  • As the use of #socialmedia hastag grew we got so much spam that the we needed a way to filter the spam out. So we added the “Filter the #SocialMedia Noise” option to bot the live and event archive pages.So now when viewing the archives you can get a clean organized transcript of the event with the moderator highlighted for readability
• Follow users on twitter directly through the live and events page
  • When you sign in with twitter on hashtagsocialmedia.com you can now easily  follow people right from the archive page without leaving the site
• Thumbs Up Feature
  • This is a ratings feature. As the events wrap up we want to be able to highlight the most insightful tweets and report them back.  Right now this feature is 100% user powered so we need your help to mine out the most valuable points in each discussion. All you have to do is click the thumbs up icon and it will increase that point value for that tweet. You can give the “Thumbs Up” during the live events or when reading back through the transcript of an archived event.
• “The Big Follow”
  • This was just added yesterday and it is one of the features we are most excited about. “The Big Follow” button will be displayed on the event archive pages, but only if you are signed in through twitter Oauth, When you click “The Big Follow” your will automatically follow all of the participants of this event on twitter. This is a great feature as everyone that participates in the weekly chats are professionals trying to advance the world of business in social media. So you can easily follow a quality list of professionals on twitter.
• Profile Pages
  • We have added profile pages so that users can look back on what other users have tweeted in previous events. So if you are following the live events on Tuesdays you can easily click the profile button and get an overview of that persons activity in the #socialmedia twitter events.

Sorting Features on the Event Archive Pages

Last week we added some basic sorting features for viewing the archived twitter events. When and event transcript you can now sort the event ascending or descending based on the time of the tweet. In other words you can read the event forwards or backwards. We also added a requested  staggered chat view that may be easier to read for some.

New Ways to Connect

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn <– Just Added

Iphone App

A couple weeks ago our iPhone app was accepted into the iTunes store. It is a free app and provides some simple and useful features. We often hear that people can not participate because they are not at the office or in front of the computer for one reason or another and this app may solve that problem for some.

1. Read the Latest Blog Entries
2. Follow the Live #sm twitter events from anywhere –
3. Participate in the live twitter event by replying or re-tweeting
4. Follow the schedule of upcoming events

One Year Anniversary

Finally we have our 52nd event coming up in just a couple of weeks. A solid year of  hosting events every week. Congrats to Jason Breed and Marc Meyer for making it happen each week.

Good News!

The official hashtagsocialmedia.com iPhone App has been accepted into the itunes store and you can get it now!

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/socialmedia/id352777958?mt=8

Why use this app? Glad you asked. Here are some of the features

• Read the blog topics and full posts
• Follow the live twitter chats on the go
• Participate in the live twitter chats while away from you comp. … reply.retweet,…etc…
• Schedule of upcoming events

Our main goal in creating this app was to give people an easy way to follow the conversations when they are not at their desk. However, we are seeing more and more opportunities for this app already so we think this is just the beginning and that we can add more features soon.

(An SEO friendly URL shortener may not be far off)
Twitter really is making an impact on the Internet more and more, like it or not. URL shorteners have popped up all over the place to accommodate long links in the strict 140 character or less twitter world. Of course, the biggest drawback to these links is they are not SEO friendly. This is a big drawback. Since all url shortners do is act as a redirect translation system all short urls point to the url service. So if you are using bit.ly or tinyurl or aything else all you are  adding backlinks to the domain of that services. Sure those services claim to use 301 redirects but lets face it, it’s likely done via programming code which basically equates to a javascript window.location url. You might get something out of it but not much. Anyways, you don’t use URL shortners as an SEO tactic in the first place.

However, in the near future, using an shortened url service may may actually work with your SEO efforts. Google has just announced today the Google URL shortener. For the time being, it is only available for their internal use but they will likely open it for general use soon. The service is named http://goo.gl/ . Not too shabby. The domain name is only 6 character total with the .gl included. They even managed to brand it  by calling it googl. Not too shabby at all.

The benefit of this service, once it hopefully goes live to the public, is that you would be registering your short URL redirect with google. So Google would not have to index a service like tinyurl or bit.ly to understand what these redirects are. They will already know and could possibly fold this index into their other mystical algorithms.. This is very timely considering the rush to create a more relevant “real time social search”. Imagine trying to index every url shortening service out there fast enough to keep up with twitter. This could eliminate that challenge altogether.

So the question is… If and when this service goes live to the public, will you still use any of the other services? If so, why?

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