For those of you struggling with defining social media, Robert Safuto’s post, My Definition Of Social Media, offers a very simple definition. It is important that we get a handle on all the buzz phrases being thrown around in regards to social media, lest we allow the terminology to get completely out-of-hand (ala Web 2.0 - circa 2005), and the discussions become so convoluted as to make them meaningless.
Can we all agree to get over how smart we think we are and just apply the old adage – KISS?
One of the things we’ve always found to be a pain is getting embeds, such as videos, bookmarks, etc, in 3rd party websites to work neatly. One of the biggest websites of course, is MySpace, who consulted with Adobe to get specific embed tag functionality added to flash 9, and promptly implemented it (linking out of a flash application, for example, is restricted) — and there really hasn’t been a good solution for this. I still don’t think there is — even though some press folks seem to think oEmbed is. It’s not, but that doesn’t mean it’s not very interesting, and worth taking a look at it. Effectively, oEmbed’s goal is to make embedding both media and metadata as simple for a consumer (or service) as knowing/having the URL to specific media. This could be achieved through a few ways, both parsing existing embed codes, or using some kind of microformat (i.e. <a href=”http://site.com/video/video-title” rel=”ombed”>Video</a>) — this is great from the perspective that I, as the application guy, can parse and get both the content/media as well as metadata about it (although, now that I’ve re-read the spec, I think there should be some more optional things in there… views, arbitrary thumbnails, original file[s] etc.. mRSS has a pretty close approximation of data that could go in this), and from the perspective of an end-user, if they’re on a page, they can post everything about that page/media/node with simply that URL.
We’re going to be implementing it in the newest version of Twiddeo — and, I hope, looking into getting an AIR-capable class implemented for it. It’s very interesting from a technical/proof of concept perspective. I think, though, the issue is two-fold:
1) There are no services, aside from Pownce, using it.
Obviously, this makes adoption tough. With only one service supporting the standard, I don’t want to pour a ton of time and resources behind implementing, standardizing and helping enhance it.
2) Users are used to simply cutting and pasting big globs of HTML. Parsing all of that fun-ness, to then try to poke for an oEmbed, would suck.
Is this the expected behavior? Parse all user input for embed, image or hrefs, then try to match all of those against some provider list, and then try to get a ping? Ugh. No? Really, part of the spec, imho, needs to be a microformat to allow this stuff to get parsed more efficiently. Right now I see a use inside of AIR (or equivilant) clients, or sites that implicitly tell people to input URLs, but for mass adoption the parsing needs to get easier.
All of that being said, I find the proposed spec personally interesting, and we’ll put some 20% time behind what makes it tick and what can make it better.
This is a clip of one of my favorite thinkers in the “new media” arena, Clay Shirky (www.shirky.com), recently speaking at Web 2.0 Expo in SFO. In a nutshell, he addresses that perplexing question I so often hear my peers (40’s – 50’s) ask one another – “Where do these kids find the time to fool with all this new Web 2.0 silliness??” The answer – these kids do not waste all their free time being zombies in front of the boob tube being fed whatever nonsense the TV gods would serve up (as I and my peers did at their age). No, they are multi-tasking and it almost always involves a mouse that allows them to engage in true interaction with their media of choice.
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