Monday, January 13, 2003

Remarkable Ubiquity From Mike Chamber's weblog: "The new Flash Player penetration stats are in (from December). The Flash Player 6 has 72% penetration. That is a 19% increase from just 3 months ago." We just got this data last week and the fine-grained details will be up on our website this week.  This is the fastest adoption that Flash Player has ever seen, and is probably the fatest adopted software runtime in the history of computing.  As I noted after the September results when the player was around 55%, with 72% the Flash Player is by far the most available video technology on the Internet, and as other bloggers have noted, should open the floodgates on broadcast and two-way video applications like never before.  It is also by far the most widely adopted rich client for interacting with distributed web services, enabling the new software as service world that many are anticipating. 11:33:34 AM    comment []

Tim Appnel Concerns about XML-RPC and Multimedia Blogs In response to an earlier post about the potential for rich media APIs for weblogs, Timothy Appnel posted some concerns that center around the appropriateness of XML-RPC for such mechanisms.  I agree with Tim's sentiment that RESTFul APIs and SOAP 1.1 can just as easily or even better handle such a mechanism than XML-RPC, and I'm not a big proponent of XML-RPC (other than the fact that it's a de facto standard in weblogs), but I also disagree that we should just stick to plain ole binary POSTs for handling binary media.  I'd like to think that the richness of namespaces (in XML-RPC or SOAP) and the need for non-browser clients (Windows, Flash, Java, Devices) and server-to-server replicaiton to have a fuller API with media meta-data would be more usable by developers than a simple HTTP/XML mechanism. But this is all just implementation details and doesn't remove the fact that we need weblog software to become much more binary, streaming and real-time media aware.   10:43:42 AM    comment []