December 9th, 2008

Native Client: Google's (other) plugin play

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 6:10 am

Categories: Google, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Google Inc., Alchemy, C, Web Browser, Plug-in, C/C++, Web Browsers, Programming Languages, Software Development, Software/Web Development

Yesterday Google announced an early developer release of Native Client, a plugin for web browsers that lets you essentially run native code like C or C++ in the browser. In theory it could be extended to other languages. The main goal is to provide native-like performance and to let C/C++ developers start creating web applications. They’ve got a couple of cool examples, including Quake running in the browser, on the developer site.

Adobe announced Alchemy at MAX, which is a similar project for the Flash Player. Like Alchemy, Native Client uses GCC-based tools to compile C or C++ into bytecode native x86 code for the specific runtime. Alchemy uses Flash and Native Client has it’s own, I assume C-based implementation. Both of these are early projects but it’s the start of a trend and an example of the ever-expanding sphere of web applications. It’s also very interesting to see this come out of Google, a company that has been doing a lot to expand the functionality of the web browser. They’ve got Gears for offline/desktop functionality, Native Client for performance, Earth for mapping, and of course Chrome for an actual browser.

Keep an eye on this project. I see the Flash Player or Silverlight has having 3 core parts: the runtime, the rendering engine, and the video codecs. Put those three things together and you’ve got an RIA plugin. Google has a bunch of disparate projects and none that do all of these, but they have a bunch of the pieces and a ton of engineering talent. It’s also telling that Google is starting to be more and more obvious that the web browser/technologies as it exists today just aren’t cutting it. That means we’ll see more energy for projects like Native Code and Gears.

December 1st, 2008

The widget conundrum

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 7:47 am

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, Rich Media, Rich Widgets, yourminis

Tags: Advertisement, Microsoft Silverlight, Mobile, Rich Internet Application, AdAge, Widgets, Desktops, Hardware, Ryan Stewart

There’s a pretty good article in Advertising Age about the benefits of widgets and the fact that not a lot of people are using it. AdAge says that “entire segment” will amount to around $100 million. That sounds like a chunk of money, and especially one for an industry that I consider a subset of rich Internet applications, but as the holy grail of advertising, it’s not much money. And AdAge talks to people that bring up a number of issues around widgets including non-standardization, cost, and scale. All decent reasons, but I think we’re just now getting to the point where the technologies are viable for widgets on a wide scale.

I consider widgets a subset of rich Internet applications mostly because of the technology behind them. Almost all widgets tend to be pretty interactive which makes platforms like Flash and Silverlight ideal for deployment. The fact that the embed model works so well with those technologies makes it easy to port them. Adobe AIR provides desktop functionality that lets you persist and create notifications. Then think about Flash and Silverlight’s move into the mobile world and how easily it will be to repurpose widgets across devices.

That last part is key. There is a fairly sophisticated ecosystem building up around monetization of widgets. yourminis was one of the first companies to the space and have focused on customization and working with partners. Since being acquired by AOL they’ve been busy adding customers and partners. The other aspect is being able to analyze this content and provide analytics. That’s where repurposing the widgets becomes more interesting. You could automatically track your widget across devices, social networks, and desktops with the same tracking back end.

There are also more complicated engaging widget platforms emerging. Sprout Builder is a great example of this. Something a bit more complex than a traditional widget, they provide a framework that can be customized with interactive content and then placed anywhere widgets can be. They provide the same kind of analytical tools so you can track where your widgets are going and even limit them by domain.

Widgets are a great way to engage users and the most powerful thing about the is that users can consume them in ways they control - desktop, web, Facebook, mobile, etc. So their value as an advertising engine is significant and with the ways the infrastructure is moving, it’s going to be easier and easier to create and deploy widgets.