Recently in Applications Category

[The article can be found here, and the video here. I would have embedded it, but it looked rather ugly.]

For the past year or so, I've been wondering why Facebook hasn't incorporated instant messaging into its hugely popular social networking system. It seems like a logical progression to me, and I'm surprised it's taken this long. But then again, maybe the company was just waiting for the perfect time to strike.

At this point, I think it's become set in stone that Facebook is (or at least is going to be) victorious over the obviously inferior MySpace. It's assumed that practically every college student has an account (which is crucial for the success of any sort of IM system), and because college folk like us are typically the ones that nurture new  Internet technologies into maturity, Facebook has everything it needs.

I'm anticipating that, at first, many will experiment with Facebook's new instant messaging feature, but the majority will still rely primarily on AIM. While Facebook Chat (very similar to GoogleTalk) seems to be unobtrusive, lightweight and well-integrated, it still runs in a browser, thus requiring more effort to maintain and being limited in its capabilities (especially when compared to an application installed on the operating system, like AIM).

But in time, I expect to see a standalone version of Facebook. With the recent release of the delightful new AIR runtime environment, the technologies are now available to design an extremely powerful, local version of Facebook, with richly aesthetic and highly interactive interfaces. The Facebook application will be a sort of "Super AIM", providing all of the flexibilities of our current IM standards (system-level control, access to the file system, the ability to directly send images and files, audio/video chat, etc.), but additionally, it will have all the perks of Facebook - extensive user profiles, the ability to search for friends by a variety of fields, integrated and user-friendly multimedia players, extensive privacy controls, groups, events, applications, etc.

Once the Facebook standalone has been released, we won't have a need for any other instant messaging system (except for talking to that 5% of stragglers who haven't gotten with the program yet), and really, none of the existing clients will even be able to compete. How could they? Facebook's insuperable advantage over everyone (Google included) is that it knows all of us...very, very well. It can take social interaction to a level that current IM clients (that know little more about us than who's on our buddy lists and what songs are quoted in our away messages) can't even fathom. And with the added power of a standalone Facebook, the gap's only going to grow...

It will have access to resources like our iTunes libraries, most likely linking friends with similar musical tastes, allowing for group playlists and custom radio broadcasts, pulling music from the files on individuals' machines. We'll also have "movie sessions", so when someone purchases a new blockbuster from the iStore, all of his/her friends can join in and watch it together as it streams from the owner's computer. When Tuesday rolls around and a new album is released, listening parties, too, could be arranged in this manner. Members of the audience could enjoy their friend's most recent musical purchase, listening, commenting, discussing (in a chatroom type of environment) without needing to interrupt the songs to verbally communicate. All of the previously mentioned gatherings would be treated as events, either public or invite-only, that users can organize and attend.

Facebook may also try to outdo Google Docs, creating its own set of collaboration tools. Users who submit their school schedules could easily be placed into course groups. With some modifications to the standalone Facebook, students could share papers, presentations, even art, modifying the files simultaneously, and chatting with one another to communicate ideas in the process.

The possibilities are there, and I do hope that at least some of the features I've described become a reality. But, maybe the Facebook community will reject that new chat/IM system and my ideas will never see the light of day. Time will tell.

Adobe has officially released the long-awaited AIR runtime environment. Being a frequent developer/user of Flash applications, this was pretty exciting news for me. I haven't had a chance to do much more than download the updates for CS3, but everything I've read/seen looks great. Most of the applications that I've tried so far have been fairly impressive, and even though none of them reach the full potential of AIR, they've suggested some interesting possibilities.

The platform offers the same ease of Flash when it comes to interface design and animation, but it takes the programming side up a notch, providing deeper functionalities previously reserved for more traditional and formal languages like C++ and Java. For one, AIR applications have the ability to read/write/modify on the local file system, which, as one application has already demonstrated, allows for interesting things like pulling information from the contents of your iTunes library. AIR applications can also create and manipulate native windows and menus, add items to the system tray and dock, build local MySQLite databases, make network connections, and communicate with other clients through network connections. These functionalities aren't anything new, of course, but this is the first time that they've been so simple to implement and allowed for such a powerful and easy-to-build front-end.

Below is a brief overview provided by Lee Brimelow, creator of gotoAndLearn.com. It outlines some of the new functionalities introduced by AIR and demonstrates how simple they are to utilize.

AIRConditioning

Having limited experience with the technology, I can't say for sure, but I expect AIR to become hugely popular in the near future. Highly aesthetic, fairly powerful applications will be much easier to produce than in the past. These programs will be light-weight, fast to install, and completely cross-platform. We'll still need the more traditional languages for more intense, highly computational games and applications, but for small to medium-sized needs, AIR may be the new standard.