March 2nd, 2007

Wallop gets a makeover with a much better interface

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:19 am

Categories: Flash, Rich Internet Applications, Wallop

Tags:

I'm still buried in email and I've been spending most of the morning coding, so hopefully I'll be able to catch up tonight and tomorrow before the weekend. But yesterday I took a quick trip to the Wallop offices to talk with Karl Jacob, the CEO and get a tour of a new interface that Wallop is planning to push to production today.

I've covered Wallop a lot in the past, and I'm still a fan of the company. There have been signs of trouble with the departure of the CEO, but after talking to Karl and seeing the new version, I think it's clear they're moving forward and not backwards. They have totally redone the UI so that it is much easier to use and added features that bring it in line with a lot of other social networks while still keeping the creativity and "Flashyness" that help it stand out.

Click the picture to check out my Wallop page without having to log in

The biggest change is that the "blob" in the center of the screen has been replaced with a menu. You can quickly switch between photos, music and the other parts of the site in a way that makes more sense than the tiny icons from before. Friends now have a much greater role. All of your friends show up in a bar on the left side of the page and you can rank them as well as drag your top friends to a section that shows on your front page. You can see which friends are online and quickly chat with them. The "network" concept is mostly gone and I think this is a good change. In keeping with the real time social aspect of Wallop, the bottom of the page shows a taskbar for "Buzz" which shows music, photos, blogs or comments your friends have added. It's much more subtle than the current "What's new" panel and I think it's a good change.

They've gone to great lengths to keep the fun of Wallop while making some major changes that will make it easier for users to find what they're looking for and contribute content. According to Karl, transactions on the site are still growing and I know they're looking at converting the application to Flex and ActionScript 3 which would give them better performance and also might make it easier to develop mods. I'm excited to see the changes go live because I think they make Wallop a better application. If you don't have a Wallop account, the beta program is ending soon, but I can send you some if you drop me an email.

February 14th, 2007

Signs of life at Wallop

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 1:09 pm

Categories: Flash, Rich Internet Applications, Wallop

Tags:

Wallop is one of my favorite companies because they took Flash and ran with it (I covered it here). They took a brand new approach to social networking and incorporated Rich Internet Application methodologies in a big way. Wallop did some things very well. I like the way social networks are displayed, I like the media integration. But there have also been complaints about how slow the application is (my large network makes Wallop very slow), and there are some small usability issues that I think frustrated some users.

But Wallop seems to be making moves. I got word that they are no longer with their PR firm, Porter Novelli (which sucks becuase I liked their rep at PN). Om Malik covered some of the struggles with management which seemed to imply that things at Wallop were less than peachy. But last night I saw that they're looking for a Flex developer. That could mean they're converting over to Flash Player 9 which would give them a huge performance boost and might help with the overall application development.

It's good to see signs of growth out of the company. I'm looking forward to see how this investment in Flex translates into the product. I think Wallop has a lot of potential so this is a step foward.

January 2nd, 2007

Rich Internet Applications I couldn't live without

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:21 am

Categories: Brightcove, Fauxto, Flash, Jumpcut, New York Times Reader, Pandora, Rich Internet Applications, Wallop

Tags:

After seeing Mike Arrington's post about Web 2.0 companies he can't live without, I thought an RIA-themed version would be fun to do. I'm also very curious which RIAs you use on a daily basis, so if I missed any, leave them in the comments.

Goowy

This year I switched from Outlook to the Flash-based Goowy and I've been happy with the switch. The integration with YourMinis is great and it gives me a snapshot of my day in the form of sports scores and comics and news. The email client has gotten much better over the pas few months and while there are still some issues, having a robust email client, contact list and calendar anywhere I go has been great. If the Goowy guys release an Apollo version of the app that allows me to take my content offline, it will make me a very happy camper.

Pandora

I don't know what I would do without Pandora. I've got channels for everything from Garth Brooks to Enya and this year I'm hoping to get a Slingbox so I can use Pandora from anywhere in my apartment. Pandora is written in OpenLaszlo and makes for a great showcase application.

The New York Times Reader

I used to hate the New York Times. I hated having to register and I figured I could get my news from other places. But the Times Reader changed that. I leave it running overnight so that it can download all the news for me and then when I wake up I browse it between reading articles from Techmeme. It's been one of the more surprising RIAs that I've found myself using but it's won a spot in my morning routine which is the highest praise I can give it.

Yahoo! Maps

I know, I'm a sucker for Flash, but I've had nothing but good experiences with the new Yahoo Maps interface. It is built in Flex 1.5 and I think it's a richer experience than Google Maps. It was very, VERY slow when I was still running Flash Player 8, but with the upgrade to Flash Player 9 I haven't had any slowdowns. The traffic overlay has been very helpful and I think the integration with Yahoo Local is a big plus.

Brightcove

YouTube is great for looking at popular videos or random clips, but for regular content I always turn to Brightcove (I love the Wall Street Journal channel and the Smart Money channel). I wish that Brightcove had something like an Apollo app or a richer app that I could pop out from the website and browse through, but I do love the full screen feature that they implemented after the Flash Player supported it.

Wallop

The flash based Wallop is my social network of choice for right now and the big reason is because of the media integration (being able to listen to my networks songs is great) and the mods. The mods make it pretty easy to trick out a page and do it in a way that it doesn't totally look like a MySpace disaster (though you could be close). I think the business model is good for RIA developers because it gives them a way to create interesting content for a growing userbase. My only complaint is that it's still hard to find people. I use MySpace because it puts me in touch with old High School friends (and because everyone is on it) but I like Wallop much more - it's more free form and fun.

Wishlist and Honorable Mention

The one thing I wish I had was a richer news reader that I could take with me offline. I've succumb to Google Reader, and I really like it, but I wish I had something like the NYT reader that I could sync and take with me later on.

Two applications I like but haven't had a chance to use are Fauxto, the web based image editor, and Jumpcut, a video site which provides a very cool video editor web application. I haven't used Fauxto just because I found out about it only a week ago and I haven't used JumpCut as much because I haven't gotten into uploading video yet. The video editing suite of JumpCut is fantastic and seems to have gotten better after being bought by Yahoo. I can't wait to see what else these guys come up with.

December 6th, 2006

Revisiting Wallop

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 9:01 pm

Categories: Experience, Flash, Micropayments, Rich Internet Applications, Wallop

Tags:

Back in September I received an invite to Wallop and gushed about the service. I was impressed partly because of the novel use of Flash and also partly because I think Wallop enhances the user experience of social networks. One of the things MySpace got right was allowing people to customize (or desecrate) their pages any way they saw fit. Wallop not only gave them that ability, but on a much less-restrictive canvas and with some for-purchase "mods" in the form of Flash widgets to spruce things up.

But recently Wallop seems to have had a tough time maintaining some of the buzz surrounding it. It's Alexa numbers (if you trust them) have fallen and the blogosphere seems to have been rather silent about Wallop. [Note: The people at Wallop have called into question the validity of the Alexa numbers and their ability to measure a Flash site. This is a legitimate concern and am planning a post about how Alexa is a poor measurement of Flash applications like Wallop. I think Alexa numbers are flawed when it comes to Flash, but don't want to remove that part of the post altogether.] So what's changed since they started and why is it worth checking out?

Now that the community is built out some, the community aspect is much improved. They had a gaping hole in that you couldn't search for other Wallop members, but that's finally been fixed, so connecting with your friends is easier. Once you've connected with them, Wallop still does a great job of giving you access to your friends music, photos and blog posts. In fact, I think this is one of the underrated strengths of Wallop.

The social aspect of Wallop revolves around multimedia content. You can browse through music that people in your network have uploaded giving you a wide variety of music at your fingertips. Wallop has a real time commenting system which helps conversations flow quite a bit. Commenting on pictures works equally well. What separates Wallop from MySpace is that users have a lot more control over their pages. You can drag multiple songs to your page, add numerous mods and create interesting sideshows. Some of this is available with third party flash widgets on MySpace, but with Wallop it's all built in and presented in such a way that makes it easy to track conversations and customize.

Another much needed improvement was the ability to view pages without logging in. This gives non-members the ability to see what they're missing. However you still can't really browse other users by common interests or demographics. With MySpace I can view the profiles of people I went to high school with but nothing like that exists for Wallop. I talked to the company and they said that kind of networking wasn't the aim of the site, but to me it seems like an important part of any social networking application.

I talked with Karl Jacob and Brian Blau (Update: I had Brian's name spelled incorrectly. Sorry Brian!) at Wallop because I was hearing some criticisms in the Flash community about how Wallop was handling the modder accounts. A lot of people that were very prominent in the Flash community had wanted to give it a try but weren't able to get accounts. After talking to the team, it sounds like they were simply swamped with modder requests and they hadn't anticipated the demand. They have over 700 modders in the short two month span they've been open and those modders have built over 350 mods. In total, the site has had more than 17,000 transactions since it launched (and it's still in beta). Karl said that right now there are modders who are cashing checks from transactions on the Wallop network.

A couple of other interesting things that came out of our conversation. One, which will be good news for Flash developers is that Wallop is looking at Actionscript 3. They aren't converting Wallop to AS3 tomorrow, but they "are actively engaged in looking at the move to Actionscript 3 and building everything today with an eye towards Actionscript 3." I think AS3 fits very well with their needs and would make Wallop a faster application. The other thing is that there are a lot of both international users and modders in Wallop. The marketplace is working very at bringing together modders and users from all around the world which I think is an excellent growth sign. This type of application would be expected to do well in Asian countries where services like Cyworld are popular and it sounds like it is taking off in other parts of the world as well.

I think Wallop still has a lot of promise, and as you can see by the charts above, when it came out there was a lot of buzz around the product showing that people were interested in a Flash social network. Wallop pushes the boundary of user interface (in some areas better than others) and it provides a fresh look at social networks. I hope it can succeed but it looks like they have their work cut out for them.