Andrew Laffoon’s Thoughts

About 3 hours ago, a teacher from Fayetteville High School in Sylacauga, Alabama, published a 38 page book created and edited by her 32-student class about World War I. What a great use of Mixbook!

View this book full size or get a printed copy at Mixbook

I have to say, developing this embed widget has reawakened my love for Flash. I forgot how much I enjoy using a timeline and editing my applications more visually. Flex is beautiful because of the power of its framework, and when I’m building a Flex app, I tend to focus on making beautiful, modularized code. But when I’m in flash, I remember that I like my app to look pretty too.

And I forgot that you can choose exactly which characters to embed in a flash .swf. That’s a great feature! We’re at 108,902 bytes right now. I need to get this thing down to 50 KB!

Mixbook launched a couple of weeks ago with a new take on Web 2.0 and monetization: actually giving users a product. Mixbook is a rich internet application that lets you create a digital photoalbum using a series of templates and photos that you upload to the site.

read more | digg story

I got me this shiny new blog, but I’m still learning how to use it. I love Wordpress.

The perfect word to test all the pages on your web site to make sure that they support long words. Excellent.

Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu
An unremarkable hill (except for the name!) in New Zealand.

The name means “The brow [or summit] of the hill [or place], where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, who slid [down], climbed [up] and swallowed mountains, [to travel the land], [who is] known as the land eater, played [on] his [nose] flute to his loved one.” (from Wikipedia)

You gotta love languages.

Raised Funding + Building Product = No Time for Blogging

Of course, the ironic thing is that I have learned SO much, so I actually have a lot to say now. One day I will have to write a post…

Ask any young (late teens - early twenties) user of MySpace why Friendster failed, and it is simple: the site was too slow and did not work right. It was obvious to me - I could hardly stand to use it, because it was aggravatingly slow. I have long forgotten my username and password, and I have no reason to go back.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15friend.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

This is a great article in the NYT about why friendster failed: they focused on all the wrong things. They spent all their time discussing how to become the next Google or Yahoo!, while they could not even keep their web site running. They surrounded themselves with the highest profile figures in the valley, casting a great vision for the future, all the while failing to execute on the most core part of the company: the web site.

This is a great story to read for anyone interested in entrepreneurship and especially for those thinking of starting a web company and raising money to do it. In the end, building a business is all about execution and customer service, not about bringing high profile people and creating buzz. Friendster had the best team, the top board members and more buzz than Google or Yahoo, yet they failed to execute and focus on what customers wanted - a web site that worked!

Congratulations Chad and Steve. You built the biggest and best video sharing site on the web, and the in the process you trumped some of the internet’s biggest players: MySpace, Yahoo! and Google. I hope you can live up to the raised expectations now that you’re part of the Google family.

My Predictions for the post-acquisition GooTube:

0. The valley will become much more attractive for entrepreneurs, VCs and web 2.0 startups. The bubble that we are in continues to grow, and acquisitions become more common as media companies fight for deals.

1. Google and YouTube will sign deals with every major copyright holder, giving them a firm legal footing.

2. YouTube will continue to grow and innovate, especially on the advertising/monetization side and integration with media providers.

3. Google will continue to shift towards becoming a media company. It will use YouTube as a lab to create an effective advertising strategy for video based on making video ads relevant to users.

4. Google will use it’s experience with YouTube to provide relevant advertising for Television.

5. BONUS: MySpace continues to wall itself off from integration with other startups (e.g. YouTube) and begins losing users.

I’d love to hear some feedback on these predictions.

Here are some links to some great coverage of the acquisition:

• TechCrunch was the first to cover it, giving it a “40%” chance of happening. Three days later, the deal was done.
• John Battelle highlights many of the major articles.
• TechCrunch provides notes from the conference call.
• VentureBeat reports that the first meeting, where Larry and Sergey offered $1.6 Billion for YouTube, took place at Denny’s. I love it.

“…plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower

The 2006 Flash Forward Conference was going on in Austin, Texas last week, and Adobe made some significant announcements:

• Flash 9 Penetration is projected to hit 50% by the end of September
• Flash 9 Pro has a lot of great new features, including some strong integration with Adobe software like Photoshop: you can now translate PSD layers into keyframes in a flash file.
• Flex Builder 2 is coming out for Mac users
• Flash Player 9 is coming out on Linux (stop whining, ruby on rails fans - Adobe loves you)

There are lots of exciting things happening in the world of Flash and RIAs (Rich Internet Applications). Today, the only way to export to Flash 9 Player is through Flex 2, but Flash 9 Pro is coming soon. For now, we can just watch as the Flash 9 Player adoption soars thanks to MySpace and the auto-update feature (a la Flash Player 8). You can see a trend in the graph below:

Do you see some trends here?

• Before Flash Player 8, adoption typically took 12 months to hit 80%.
• Flash Player 8 hit 86% in 9 months - with so many sites using Flash and the new auto-update feature.
• Flash Player 9 is already to 50% adoption in 3 months - thanks to MySpace requiring the new player for its audio and video widgets due to their security flaw

What does this all mean?

It is the best time ever to learn Flash and Flex and use them to design the next generation of rich internet applications. Working with AJAX, Flex and backend frameworks like Ruby on Rails (yes, they can all work together), new applications can be rapidly developed that are highly interactive, scalable and robust. Now is a great time to start.