RIAs take Christmas shopping to a whole new level
Around Christmas time, shopping malls and streets are crazy. Everyone seems to want to buy their Christmas gifts at the very last moment which usually turns this task in to a an absolute nightmare. Why not get your Christmas gifts online? I know some people will say that you can’t really browse through an online store and they are right. Well… They used to be right. There are a couple of really good examples online that let you browse an online store just as you would browse a physical store.
Amazon’s Windowshop is still in beta but is already very promising and it actually works! While preparing for this blog post, I was browsing through the Windowshop and found a book about the Obama campaign. When I clicked on it to get more information, a female voice started reading the synopsys of this book. Right after that, I bought the book.
When you click on a DVD or video game, you get a trailer to get an idea on how it looks. When you click on an album or audiobook, you hear an excerpt from it. When you like something, you just add it to your shopping cart and continue browsing. No need to wait in line to pay for your gifts, no need to wait in line to get giftwrapping. You can just do it from the comfort of your home.
The Magic Shelf on the homepage of Borders.com is another great example.
The Magic Shelf is the first thing you’ll see when you point your browser to Borders.com. It’s like the first shelves you see when you walk in to an actual Borders store. It displays all the new releases and staff picks. The Magic Shelf gives you detailed product information and customer reviews while making it easy to add the products to your wish list or shopping cart.
This is what rich internet applications (RIAs) are all about. Using the best of the web to make tasks like this easy to use and fun. And it also pays off for the retailer. First of all, they can quickly and easily update these RIAs so that their homepage is constantly changing, creating reasons for shoppers to return regularly. It also allows them to quickly respond to events (e.g. the election of a new president). By putting The Magic Shelf RIA on their homepage, Borders.com already dramatically improved their key metrics.
11% of all users are likely to recommend a product using The Magic Shelf. 41% more products are viewed and they also saw a 62% higher conversion after putting this RIA on their homepage (Source: Allurent).
I absolutely love these RIAs and wish that European e-tailers would soon follow their example. With numbers like these, they would be stupid not to…
SlideRocket out in the open
SlideRocket is definitely one of my favorite Flash-based RIAs out there. It’s been in private beta for quite some time but today it has opened up to the public. The online tool allows you to create stunning presentations, manage them intelligently, share them securely and then measure the results — and the AIR client allows you to use your presentations offline.
“SlideRocket also includes an online marketplace where you can find all the content and services you might need to make your presentations great. SlideRocket goes beyond traditional presentation tools by harnessing the power of the Internet and making everything available to you in an integrated and intuitive online interface. SlideRocket is provided in a software-as-a-service model in a variety of price points starting at free.”
SEO for Flash based RIA’s just became a lot easier
Update: Google also published a FAQ on this topic
Search engine optimization has always been sort of a nightmare for RIA developers. SEO is always the first things clients ask about these days. And it’s not just a problem with Flash-based rich Internet applications (RIAs). AJAX-based applications have the exact same issues. Just yesterday, I heard of an interactive agency having to really persuade a client that it’s Flash-based site would get picked up by search engines if they did it right. Workarounds like using SWFobject in combination with SWFaddress are pretty common. But you still don’t get the everything indexed. This method basically means creating a hidden HTML version of your site. While this also gives you additional benefits for accessibility and mobile browsers, this is pretty cumbersome to do.
Today we are teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and RIAs. Adobe is providing an optimized Flash Player to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in the Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can be confident it can now be found by users around the globe.
Improved search of SWF content will provide immediate benefits to companies leveraging Adobe Flash software. Without additional changes to content, developers can continue to provide experiences that are only possible with Adobe Flash technology, without the trade-off of a loss in search indexing. It will also positively affect the Search Engine Optimization community who will develop best practices for building content and RIAs utilizing Adobe Flash technologies, and enhance the ability to find and monetize SWF content.
I’m sure most of you know that static text in SWF was already being indexed by search engines but with this new technology, all your content is being indexed — including dynamically loaded data and different states in your application — without having to change anything!
More info:
Adobe Devnet
Ted Patrick
Ryan Stewart
TechChrunch
InsideRIA
Flex RIA Photoshop Express launched today
Adobe Photoshop Express is now in public beta. Photoshop Express is a free Rich Internet Application (RIA) built with Flex that allows you to store, sort and show off digital photos with eye-catching effects. It’s a perfect example of how powerful Flex and ActionScript have become.
As with every public beta period, Adobe is looking for your feedback on product features and functionality, which will continue to evolve over time. I have already added one feature request. There’s currently no support for Flickr. I know Flickr already uses Picnik but it would be great to have as much options as possible in Photoshop Express. (Update: Ryan Stewart heard that Flickr support is coming soon) Then again, I’m wondering if I could just switch to Photoshop Express as my main online photo app… It has taken much of Adobe’s best image editing technology and made it simple and accessible to a new online audience. Photoshop Express allows users to store up to 2 gigabytes of images online for free, make edits to their photos, and share them online in creative ways, including downloading and uploading photos from popular social networking sites like Facebook.
Update: John Nack is saying that an AIR-version is coming soon which will enable offline image editing and printing services.
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