Why Doesn’t Adobe Share Get Any Love?
Richard MacManus has a post up about Slideshare and how it could be becoming the “leading pure play online presentation app” out there. And I think he’s right, it’s great. But Adobe has something that sort of resembles Slidshare, called incidentally, Share. There is a ton of interest in companies like Slideshare and Scribd and Flash plays a huge role in both of those companies. Slides have to be rich and Flash makes it easy to show off that richness.
So why does Share never get mentioned in the conversation? Partly I’m not sure Share is meant to compete with Slideshare and Scribd. I haven’t talked extensively to the product team so I’m not sure what their longer term strategy is but right now you can’t search slideshows. Share is meant as more of a direct-sharing tool. We store the documents, you can share them via email or embed them but there is no way to search public documents. In some respects, I think Adobe Share is meant to be more a part of the entire collaboration puzzle. But it’s also a hint into where Adobe is going next. We have a pretty fleshed out API for Share. Developers can build their own user interfaces around what Share offers (storage, document management, and collaboration). Adobe has a TON of knowledge inside the company and we’re starting to look into ways we can use that internal knowledge and expose it to people. One way will be services and I think Share is a step in the right direction…even if I can’t search public documents. 
Oh, and Richard, if you’re looking for pure-play presentation creation apps, it doesn’t get better than this.
[tags]Share, Scribd, Slideshare, Online Presentations, Flash[/tags]
Posted in Flash
March 18th, 2008 at 12:06 am
Adobe Share is very promising in my view but it gets little love partly because its behind the registration firewall.
Another point in favor of Adobe Share is that it supports SWF files which I don’t think is supported by any other doc. sharing site except screencast.com
March 18th, 2008 at 12:46 am
Thanks Ryan for the tips! I actually wasn’t aware of Adobe’s one, but very interesting that you guys are doing that. And I will check out Sliderocket right now
March 18th, 2008 at 1:19 am
well, im going to the beta site and I have to sign up before I can see anything with my “adobe id”. there is no demo without signing up and the page looks.. hmm corporate..
why is there no “no signup” flash demo?
no preview for anything other then pdf and images makes this kinda useless for me btw
wait for more features
March 18th, 2008 at 4:40 am
I’m planning Adobe Share support for AgileAgenda (my scheduling app), but the thing that’s been keeping me from doing it is the beta status.
When it goes official, what will be the fee structure? Free? Free for a limited account, pay for more? Pay-only? How committed it Adobe to the technology? If nobody uses it will it be gone in a year?
Also, being able to embed the content in a web page is great, if you’re sharing one of the few supported formats. But what about custom file formats? I want to supply a custom swf that’s used as the embedded viewer.
March 18th, 2008 at 6:37 am
Adobe Share doesn’t support PowerPoint files yet does it?
March 18th, 2008 at 7:33 am
I just had a look at Share and it looks really nice from a collaboration point of view. I have serious problems with collaboration at the moment because my web hosting restricts my email attachments to < 5MB. Personally I think this is a good thing because email was never meant to contend with huge files, but from a business perspective it sucks – I keep having to tell people mail stuff to another email address, which confuses the issue because then they start using that one to try and communicate…
Anyway, I love the API idea and can’t wait to see a desktop widget that I could drop my files on to be sent to someone I was collaborating with.
Saying that, I think that some companies are still very dubious of allowing their files to be held on other people’s storage, but at the end of the day, it’s no different than putting it on web-hosting, it’s just a perception / trust issue.
I will be having a play with Share over the next few weeks to see if I can use it for collaborating, but I think the problem is that you have to go through a frustrating registration process first. I think the idea of having projects and separating these out for each login would be good for collaboration. I don’t want company A seeing files for company B, but I need to work with them both.
Keep up the good work and send me that widget.
March 18th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Adobe Share gets no love for two reasons:
1) There’s no community. Adobe doesn’t do community.
2) It doesn’t work. I’ve tried to use it, I’ve seen others seen a few bloggers attempt to use it – and it never gets past “Generating Flash Preview.” And then they go back to Scribd and SlideShare – solutions that actually do what they’re supposed to.
March 18th, 2008 at 8:48 am
I like Share a lot. Hopefully it will be fully integrated in all new versions.
March 18th, 2008 at 10:21 am
I love Adobe Share. The extremely active and highly skilled Adobe developer community embraced it as soon as it dropped into beta, and Ray Camden came out with ColdFusion CFCs to leverage the platform in ColdFusion apps. It’s over at his RIAForge.com site, and it couldn’t be any easier to build an app on Share. I’m going to do it today, as a matter of fact. As soon as I get the bugginess out of my view transitions in Flex….
March 18th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Whoops, sorry guys that some of the comments got stuck in the moderation queue. I’m in Asia so I’m a bit behind.
Really, REALLY great feedback on all levels. Especially with regards to the Adobe ID. I’m going to start pushing the team to use OpenID for a lot of our services because I think it’s a no-brainer. These comments are hugely valuable to that cause.
Thanks again guys, I’ll be sending all of this to the team.
March 18th, 2008 at 11:31 am
I’m a fan of what Share offers. I see it having a big potential with BuzzWord integration. I see it also tying into Connect as well. I’m a fan of services like these, which are reliable, and allow me to integrate an API into my apps. I love it, I just don’t use it yet.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:51 am
Put most simply, it gets no love because Adobe doesn’t advertise and hype it enough. You’ve got to do things to attracts attention like integrate with OpenID, Twitter, Google Docs (and Buzzword), Facebook, or whatever new and interesting site is out there to get people to think of it as something new and exciting on a monthly, if not weekly basis. Otherwise, as people have sort of noted, it’s just corporate-ware.
April 16th, 2008 at 8:51 am
[...] month, Adobe evangelist Ryan Stewart asked why Adobe Share doesn’t get as much attention as other document sharing services. Without picking on all the gory details of Share itself, the main way I see Whizbang 2.0 services [...]