O’Reilly explains what may kill the Kindle in the long run.
There’s few people out there who have a better understanding of digital publishing than O’Reilly. He’s spent the better part of the last two decades publishing technical books that have given developers the information they need to make innovation happen, while being a driving force behind the rise of “Web 2.0″.
In this article for Forbeshe not only discusses why Amazon’s opaque DRM standards are eventually going to be the device’s biggest hurdle, but also the subtle, but important differences that have made the iPhone work even though it’s a locked down device.
Amazon’s Kindle file format doesn’t provide support for tables or for so-called monospaced fonts, two formatting features that we use heavily in our line of technical books. And there is a viable alternative: Epub, the open format from the International Digital Publishing Forum, is based on the Web’s native format, HTML, and provides full table and font support. This is the first “strategy tax” paid by those who embrace proprietary platforms: They can’t support the needs of every niche and must prioritize their support for mainstream needs.
The single point of purchase was also a non-starter for us, since my fundamental understanding of information marketplaces is that they grow bigger and more lucrative for everyone when there is a rich ecosystem of cooperating players.
If you’re interested in understanding why open standards work for business and growth, it’s worth a read.
Why the XBox 360 may already be the next generation’s winning console
It’s heresy among the gamers to say that any particular console may have “won” a particular round of the game wars, especially when you’re talking about features not directly related to the games themselves. Over at Offworld, Jim Rossignol posts an excellent article discussing how the XBox may already be a generation ahead.
All I have to do is consider that I already spend most of my time gaming on a PC. Partly that’s because I’m an old man with a fetish for humming boxes that I built myself, and partly it’s because I want all the other features that a PC offers: instant access to my email, Twitter, screen-grab software, and my own music to replace generic rock track X on racing game Y.
If the 360 does start to support all these things (there’s no confirmation as to whether Last.FM will be able to run in the background as a soundtrack to your games), it’ll become the kind of gaming machine that I want to spend my time with for more reasons than just because it has some games that my PC doesn’t.
It will become a device that has more of the networked infrastructure, and more of the media tweaks and toys that I take for granted as part of my desktop computer.
I think that there’s way more to it than just this. With the Natal Microsoft is planning to re-launch the XBox. And if I’m reading between the lines correctly, they’re essentially going to do what Nintendo did with the Wii, except they won’t even bother to beef up the hardware. They’ll simply bundle the new motion technology in and go on a media blitz. And I think that could work. After all the box will basically be able to do everything from downloading games to playing movies and music off of your home network.
It’s taken a while, but the 360 may finally be the “everything box”.
Latest Post on ISG: Social Games are a Constant Deployment Environment
My latest and greatest column is up over on ISG.
I’m concentrating on articles about social game development, including the opportunities and challenges of making games for social platforms. If that interests you definitely take a look.
Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about new entries for Mediashifters. I may talk about more general gaming trends, since no one seems to be following mainstream gaming in general, and I’m hearing too many people saying Sony “won” E3. Hint:They did not.
If you have any ideas about what you’d like me to be writing about here that I’m not covering over on ISG, please let me know.
Streaming Social Games?
Has it dawned on anyone else that the real game changer for social and portable media is going to be remote computing delivery systems like OnLive? Seems like it has…
“Through the VolleeX engine, we can take full PC games, MMOs or even virtual worlds and stream them to any 3G enabled handsets, “says Vollee’s head of business development, Julian Corbertt in an interview with Pocket Gamer. “This means that you can now access games or full persistent online worlds right from your mobile handset. It’s a real step forward for mobile games as you can now have meaningful connected experiences on your handset.”
But maybe they’re just aiming too high. Streaming games will never really deliver core game experiences to the degree that twitch players are going to find acceptable, at least not until we fix the speed of light. Still the idea of doing it with something like WOW makes infinite sense, and allows you to deliver relatively high end graphical experiences to relatively low-end platforms.
Applications on Facebook are already becoming more server driven, so why not pull the whole thing over and deliver rich, immersive experiences one click at a a time to audience that will be perfectly happy with lag and a low frame rate?
The animation industry was taken by surprise when Hanna Barbera starting delivering cartoons for television using less than a quarter of the frame-rate of features. Could history be about to repeat itself?
Casual Gaming Metrics Applied to Social Gaming
This is a talk I gave at the Facebook Developer’s Garage back in March.
ISG Column: Good ain’t always better
My latest column for ISG is up
Every time a new market opens up the first games to appear are built on traditional, time-tested play patterns. From the DS to the iPhone, from XBLA to browser games, it’s always rock-solid gameplay that shows up first, with the fancy stuff pulling up in a later bus. And it’s been true since the beginning of the medium. It wasn’t the gorgeous graphics that made pong a household name.
Sure, basic expectations have grown in the last thirty years. These days players expect a lot more from even the most basic games than just a sprinkling of pixels and some bloops and bleeps. But it’s not zero-sum either. In the wrong hands, or used in the wrong way, adding more graphical effects may just serve to confuse your audience, or make a game that has less mainstream appeal. More isn’t always better, and the audience for social games isn’t one that will necessarily appreciate a hardcore experience.
What’s up with instant messaging?
Internet Messaging has always been a bit of a red-headed step child. Everybody has it, but no one really seemed to like it all that much. Even the term "chat" made it all seem so inconsequential.
And that makes sense. It’s a relatively "hot" medium for the Internet, demanding that you pay attention to an ongoing conversation where anyone you’re chatting with can demand as much of your time as they like. And there’s no real filters. The person demanding a response can be anyone from your best friend to that "so h0t grl with sexxxxy pics" that would very much like you to click on the link to her site, please.
But spam or no, before the rise social media IM was the primary way to hang out with people online. These days, between Twitter, Facebook and SMS messages I almost never open up my chat client at all. And the times I do end up in a messaging session it’s usually inside of another website, like Google Mail, Skype orin Facebook.
But if the old-fashioned one to one style of IM is dying, or at least evolving beyond recognition, it’s doing it quietly, with no one even bothering to report on the disappearance of what was once a major method of communication on the web.
Latest post on ISG: Social Optimism
I’m still writing pieces for Inside Social Games, although you might not know it from reading this site…
My latest piece is on the bright future for Social Games. I’m currently working on something a little less optimistic.
Here’s the excerpt to whet your appetite:
I’m actually beginning to wonder if the future for social platform gaming may turn out to be so rosy that our dogs and cats will indeed be a target market for social entertainment in the next few years.
There have been a few concrete events in the last couple of weeks that have given me a reason to have some genuine optimism. First is Facebook Connect, which strikes me as proof positive that Facebook is, for the present at least, genuinely committed to supporting application developers in a (mostly) open manner that will everyone to continue to make a decent profit for the (foreseeable) future. (There’s that conservative side speaking again.) Allowing everyone to win may seem like an obvious strategy, but the history of games is one where the person providing you with the platform is also one of your biggest competitors. Sony, Nintendo, Sega, and even Microsoft, all had divisions making “first party” games that were trying to eat as much of the market as possible even while they were charging everyone else for the privilege of publishing on their platform. Even the Wii, last year’s great mainstream hope of the living room, is utterly dominated by titles made by Nintendo.
What the Newspapers gave away (and what they have left)
Scoble posts a nice rundown on why he thinks print news missed the boat (again) by letting Twitter own crowd-sourced news.
I’ve been pretending in my head that I’m a newspaper exec. When I do that I keep beating myself around the face. Why? Because the newspaper industry keeps giving the geeks free meals. Let’s study the free meals:
Free meal #1. Giving away classified advertising to Craig’s List.
Free meal #2. Giving away photography to Flickr (look at the photos from the Chinese Earthquake, why didn’t this happen on a newspaper branded site?).
Free meal #3. Giving away front page news to blogs like Huffington Post.
Free meal #4. Giving away “small” community news like births, deaths, birthdays, etc to Facebook.
Free meal #5. Giving away real-time news to Twitter.
Free meal #6. Giving away news distribution to Google News and Amazon Kindle, among others. With new sites like Kosmix coming on strong (hundreds of percent of growth month over month).
Free meal #7. Giving away restaurant reviews to Yelp.
Free meal #8. Giving away traffic information to Google Maps.
Free meal #9. Giving away celebrity news to Facebook and Twitter. (Why is Oprah on both of those, and why didn’t the newspaper industry lock up Oprah and keep her on a newspaper brand?)
Free meal #10. Giving away local news to Topix (at least that was funded by a newspaper brand).
Free meal #11. Giving away business news to Yahoo Finance and Google Finance (and something new that will get announced tomorrow).
Free meal #12. Giving away news ranking to Memeorandum.
Free meal #13. Giving away astrology to Astrology.com.
Free meal #14. Giving away comics to Comics.com.What is their latest giveaway? Crowd-sourced news. I visit Twitter Search every day to find out what is “hot news.” That’s something I used to look at newspapers and older media for (radio, TV) but Twitter is just plain better at telling me what is trending.
There’s some breathless enthusiasm here that I think is wishful thinking, but ultimately it’s about being intelligent enough to recognize the value of what you actually have in the new media landscape, and the papers do seem to be, once again, trying to save something that doesn’t have any value by pretending it does, and hoping the can convince others to legislate that for them.
Speaking tonight at The Facebook Developers Garage
I’ll be giving a talk in San Francisco tonight on casual gaming metrics applied to social gaming. If you’re in town for GDC and looking for something to do tonight, this may be the meetup for you!
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
6:30pm – 9:30pm
Hyatt Regency San Francisco
5 Embarcadero Center
San Francisco, CA
There’s more info here.
I’ve posted the slides here.