Congratulations to the SlideShare team which raised another $3 million in funding. They’re a really great use of Flash and they’ve shown that you can take something that seems fairly boring – like powerpoints – and create a community around it, making it more interesting and valuable than ever. They also simplified the user experience so that anyone could find any presentation they wanted to, share it, comment on it, and interact with it. I hope we get closer to that model with Adobe Share.
TechCrunch’s article about the news seems to write-off online presentation applications as being not simple enough but I think the popularity of SlideShare shows that what’s really great is the community around something. One of the reasons I’m excited about the future of Adobe Share is that we’ve got a huge ecosystem of things like Buzzword, Photoshop Express, Connect, and LiveCycle – a series of online services and server products, that when you combine with a community opens up some really great possibilities.
Adobe Share doesn’t have near the reach or freedom that SlideShare has, but as we start tying all of our various products together I think it will be valuable that you can share assets from Photoshop Express or collaborate on a document in Buzzword with Adobe Share as the hub. You can create living documents or presentations and then allow people to interact with them in different ways. Sometimes that will be tagging, commenting, or rating. Other times it could be actually editing the document with Buzzword. It could be discussing and marking up the document in Connect. It could be downloading it in a number of formats (PDF, PPT, etc) or embedding it on your blog with Flash.
Collaboration and workflow on the web are still in their infancy. As the technologies have gotten richer we’re starting to see new ways for people to work together. SlideShare is a perfect example of how great new, simple, community-based ideas can be for “knowledge workers”. But RIAs are going to let us do a lot more in this area down the road.
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