With the YouTube announcement today Steve Rubel has a good post on the future being Web Services. If you look around he’s got some awfully compelling arguments. Look at a lot of the stuff you use on the web how many are web sites and how many are web services? I try not to visit the Twitter page and when I do I think of it less as a site and more as a touch point. Just one more way to enter my data and send it out. Amazon S3 takes the notion of Web Services even further by giving you a place to store stuff and exposing it from wherever you want. With web services it doesn’t matter how you’re accessing the data, just that you are.

And this is a big reason why I think Adobe’s pushing innovation on our own platform and doing things like Adobe AIR when a lot of momentum seems to be towards the browser. In a world of web services is the browser the ultimate access point? I say no. There are devices, there’s your desktop, there’s your Wii/PS3/Xbox, there’s your refrigerator. All of those things are connecting to the cloud to pull information, data, rich media and whatever else. One of the unspoken (or maybe just unheralded) part of Adobe’s platform is that we’re looking to enable a rich platform for all kinds of devices. And we want building on that platform to be easy so you can take the same code and run it on Mac, Windows, Linux, in any browser on any device.

And a big reason for this is that we’re starting to enable a lot of services ourselves. We’ve got Kuler, CoCoMo, Buzzword, Share and others. Obviously not all of those are web services (and we’re working on parts of that). But it’s about being able to leverage our services wherever you want which is the core value of our platform. I can’t wait to see how services transform Adobe and how people using our platform leverage services from all over to create rich, valuable experiences.

Something’s going on and I like what ReadWriteWeb is thinking. Supposedly YouTube is making an announcement tomorrow and no one is quite sure what the deal is. If it’s higher quality video, that would be great. YouTube has been using the old Sorenson codec since the beginning while other competitors have been rolling out higher quality versions with the On2 codec or even H.264. The one thing about the Sorenson codec was that it only required Flash 7, so YouTube worked with older versions of the player. Are they comfortable now with the penetration numbers so they’re opening up higher quality versions? YouTube is already doing a bunch of encoding to H.264 to support the iPhone so maybe now they’re exposing those files to the Flash Player which would help boost the penetration numbers for the latest update (I’m not sure what they are currently).

If it’s higher quality video then that’s a great thing for everyone. I still love YouTube but man the video is hard to watch at times. I think people have gotten acclimated to bad video quality on the web so a site like YouTube could go a long way towards raising everyone’s expectations.

[tags]Flash Video, YouTube, Flash Player[/tags]

I feel like a punk because I don’t have a Hulu invite and they’re launching today with a ton of content. Hulu was one of the first companies to embrace the HD-Flash revolution with H.264 content and they’ve pushed on as one of the more interesting video plays in the space. They have a plethora of multimedia content all delivered in Flash and frankly, the list of partners they’ve amassed is impressive:

FOX, NBC Universal, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros. Television Group, as well as Access Hollywood, AST Dew Tour, BNET, Bravo, Broadway Video, CenterStaging, Chic.tv, Chiller, CHOW, CNET, Comedy Time, E! Entertainment Television, ExerciseTV, FEARnet, Ford Models, Fox Atomic, Fox Movie Channel, Fox Reality, Fox Searchlight, Fox Sports, Fox TV Studios, Fuel TV, FX Networks, G4TV, Gamespot, Gamespy, Hidden Universe, IGN, Image Entertainment, Lionsgate, LX.TV, MEN7, Mojo, Movieola, My Network TV, National Geographic Channel, National Geographic Digital Shorts, NBA, NBC Sports, NBCU TV, NHL, Oxygen, Paley Media, Red Bull, Reveille, Salient Media, SciFi Channel, Shout! Factory, Sleuth Channel, SpaceRip, Speed, Sundance Channel, Taste TV, The Fight Network, The Golf Channel, The Onion, The Style Network, Thought Equity, TV Guide, TVG, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox Television, Twentieth Television, Universal Pictures, USA Network, Versus, Vuguru, WatchMojo, Wine Library TV and World Wrestling Entertainment®.

Did you see that? NHL. In FLASH VIDEO, Let’s hope I can get some sweet clips from the future 2007-2008 Stanley Cup Champion Colorado Avalanche on Hulu when it launches tomorrow. Why do people use Flash video? Because it works and it provides a great experience. Props to Hulu and their partners for recognizing it.

[tags]Hulu, Flash video, Flash, Rich Media[/tags]

Since I surprisingly got so much attention last time I wanted to point people to my thoughts on Apple’s Shareholder meeting. It was newsworthy enough that I thought it was better suited to ZDNet than here. Plus hopefully they won’t mess up my job title over there.

[tags]Adobe, Flash Lite, iPhone[/tags]

With the help of the always-badass Simeon Bateman I’ve got an SVN repository up for all of my various projects. For the most part these will be in varying states of disarray but I’m hoping to start using this for actual workable demos so that people can go in and grab useful source. Anything like that will show up in the release folder (as you can see, it’s empty). Right now the only two projects I have are an AIR GPS mapping application I’m working on and an AS3 GPX library.

I haven’t gotten to build a ton of demos because I tend to focus on the blogging/business side of things more but hopefully this will give me some more incentive to play. I also need to ask my boss for a couple of solid weeks to crank out samples. Maybe after the on AIR tour .

[tags]SVN, Personal, Projects, Development[/tags]

Darryl Taft has a good interview up with Kevin Lynch in which they cover a bunch of topics. Kevin touches on everything from open sourcing Flash to Kevin’s view of the competitive landscape between Microsoft and Adobe. I think most of this has been talked about before, but Kevin is the guy who drives the strategy, so it’s good to hear it from him. One of the things Kevin spends some time on is security. The issue of AIR security has come up recently, so I highly suggest you read that section. We spent a TON of time on nailing the security model and we think we’ve got a very good one that both users and developers can be happy with.

[tags]Kevin Lynch, AIR, Security[/tags]