I posted an article this morning on Picnik moving towards a free model, and then went through my RSS feeds, and found a link to a great article by Chris Anderson at Wired on why Free is the Future of Business. Well worth a read, and very timely given Picnik's announcement today.

Picnik has announced that it is making its premium editing features, previously restricted to Premium members only, available to everyone for free. They will maintain the Premium subscription, at $24.95 USD per year, for people who want new advanced editing tools, full screen editing, fonts from FontShop, and more.

This is a sad day for people, who like me were hoping that rich Internet applications would be monetized by subscription, rather than advertising. (Picnik will be adding in advertising for non Premium members to supplement the loss of revenue.)

The move is obviously a reaction to FotoFlexer's announcement that its editing tools will be made available for free.

Still, I'm disappointed. First, I don't think that having advertising in an RIA like Picnik makes any sense whatsoever (banner ads rarely make sense anywhere). Unless they find a way to make the ads relevant, users will end up with mass media advertising at the top of every page - surely a distraction to most, and something that negatively affects the (otherwise amazing) user experience.

Secondly, its sad to see that the value of an amazing online application continues to erode. I really like Picnik, and actually think its worth $24.95 a year. Its disappointing that not many others see the value in that. I'm hoping that one of the online editors can find where the value is for the end user - with these two announcements its obvious not in the editor itself.

Here's hoping that someone figures it out soon - the last thing we need is more banner advertising online.

More at Mashable. Ryan Stewart also has some great things to say.

I don't know about you, but lately the amount of email that I've received from sites where "friends" are inviting me to join their "networks" / super poking me / adding me to the applicaiton is getting ridiculous. Here's a message to the owners of these sites and applications: this is SPAM. I honestly don't care if someone is inviting me to join their "Trust Network" on Spock (and I'm not a 'Future Spocker', I'm actually a regular human being with a first name), or if someone has recently added me as a contact on Plaxo. When you email me, its SPAM. I didn't ask for it, I didn't sign up for anything, and I don't really want to join your social network / video sharing site / contact management website / Facebook application or whatever else you're emailing me about. I'm pretty happy with what I'm doing right now, thank you very much. And it really, really ticks me off that the only way to get "View my options" or "Change my contact settings" is to join your website. There's something wrong with having to give you my email address so you don't email me anymore.

I guess this is SPAM 2.0 - people and friends entering in your email address so that companies don't have to rent lists out anymore. Whatever it is, I'm getting tired of it.

Sorry for the rant, now back to our regular blog posts about cool RIAs. Hopefully ones without email invitations.

TechCrunch has an article today about TV Trip, a new site that allows visitors to see videos of hotels and hotel rooms before they book. I was a bit skeptical of how useful this would be, but after seeing some of the videos, I think I'm sold. The difference between a live video and photographs for rooms is amazing. There's something about video that brings the hotel to life - whether its people walking around, panning for different views... (It might be the fact that the videos don't appear to be staged in any way - so you get a real look at what the hotel looks like).

One of the things that I like most about writing this blog, and sites like TV Trip, is how people are really thinking outside the box to come up with ways to improve the user experience. I think TV Trip is a good example, as is Teamwork Athletic Apparel's website that allows you to design team uniforms online, or Allurent's AIR based e-commerce application that makes matching your existing clothing as easy as dragging, dropping and clicking.

If you're building a website these days, I'd urge you to brainstorm about how you can do things differently. How can you improve the user experience - can you display information in a map rather than a table for a more visual experience? Can you integrate online video? The technology these days is the easy part - Flex Builder is now 1/2 price, Flash Media Server is available for free for limited connections, Amazon allows you to build and host websites reliably.

The technology is the easy part these days - the hard part is coming up with unique ways to use it.

Yesterday Mozilla launched a new project, called Prism, on their Labs page. Prism allows web developers to build web applications that run as desktop apps - they get their own icon in the dock, they get their own menu, and they launch in a version of Firefox that has no browser chrome (forward, back buttons).

Initially this sounds a lot like AIR, although there are a few differences. First of all, Prism currently has no mechanism to work offline, though they are working on including it. Count on it using functionality from or similar to Google Gears, given the close relationship between Google and Mozilla. Secondly, it won't have access to read local data natively (at least it isn't mentioned explicitly). This is something I think is a major advantage to AIR - the ability to get to the local file system means you don't have to upload files to the server and then download them back to the client again - you can access them directly.

However, some similarities certainly exist, and its nice to see people acknowledging the same problems - its good validation for what AIR does. First of all, there's no browser chrome in either an AIR application or Prism, so the back button and bookmarks and other browser characteristics disappear. These don't make much sense in applications (though its interesting to note that the eBay AIR application actually added those elements in based on user feedback). Secondly, there's some benefit to being on the taskbar or dock, both to users and to websites. For users, its easier to launch the application, and that's also good for sites making those applications - if its easier to get to, people are more likely to use it.

Mike Chambers has a great blog post on the tone that the Mozilla people take with respect to Prism. I agree with him completely - it does sound like what Adobe is doing is evil, and what they're doing is great, even though AIR can do exactly what they're doing (and more). Sounds like we (Adobe) need to do some more education on the fact that AIR can run HTML / Ajax apps without having any Flash integration at all. In fact, there's nothing in AIR that requires you to write Flash or Flex code - you can write an AIR application in only HTML and JavaScript. (In fact, one of the first AIR applications was GMail on AIR.)

The advantage that Mozilla has for Prism is that they can integrate it into Firefox, and hit about 30% of the web community immediately. They're relationship with Google means that the technology will likely be implemented by Google applications, like GMail, which gives it immediate credibility and a ton of installations. The advantage to using Adobe AIR is that Adobe has a great track record of getting software installed on a lot of computers - the latest version of the Flash Player is installed on 98% of machines, and we can use that knowledge to get AIR installed on as many computers as possible, and as quickly as possible. While not the only consideration to be made, developers must consider how many people can use their applications without having to install additional software programs. I think currently that's an advantage for Adobe, but time will tell how well Mozilla does at getting Prism installed.

There's lots of good news here for developers though. Google Gears (if that's what Prism uses) and AIR use the same SQLite database, and work has been done to standardize the APIs. Adobe donated the Tamarin runtime to Mozilla, so coding should be similar for Flex AIR applications and Prism applications. Perhaps most importantly, there's choice in the market, and competition always keeps people motivated to work hard and improve things.

There's an interesting discussion this morning on a few tech focused blogs about whether or not rich Internet applications matter. Anne Zelenka posted her thoughts at Web Worker Daily to get the discussion going, and many people have chimed in, including Ryan Stewart.

I think part of the problem is defining what exactly qualifies as a rich Internet application. I don't think there's a consistent definition of what constitutes an RIA. Some of the comments to Anne's post focus on Ajax, and adding Ajax functionality to existing websites. To me, those aren't rich Internet applications: they're websites with useability improvements added through the use of technology (mostly Ajax). I wouldn't classify YouTube as a rich Internet application - its a website that uses Flash to display content, but its not an application. Gmail, on the other hand, is definitely an RIA - its an application that would have been delivered as a desktop app not too long ago.

Wikipedia defines RIAs as "Web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. RIAs typically transfer the processing necessary for the user interface to the Web client but keep the bulk of the data (i.e., maintaining the state of the program, the data etc) back on the application server."

When thought of in that form, RIAs have a number of advantages over traditional desktop applications, and these reasons form the basis for why RIAs are important. From a business perspective, a better user experience has been shown to increase conversion rates, increase spending amount and provide a higher return on investment. Rich Internet applications accomplish this for web applications focused on e-commerce and monetary transactions. They're important from a business perspective.

From a developer perspective, RIA development can lead to lower costs and quicker time to development. Fewer calls back to the server results in less data going over the wire, reducing bandwidth costs, and (if done properly), simplifying development. I've given examples of developers doing this in my talk on rich Internet applications at previous PHP conferences. Note that these benefits can apply not only to rich Internet applications, but any website that uses Ajax or Flash to improve the user experience. Macrumors saved something like 160 GB of data by moving to an Ajax system to refresh comments during one of Steve Jobs' keynotes.

From an end user experience, RIAs are an improvement. People no longer need to worry about installing applications and keeping software up to date. This is a major problem for many people - take a look at my parents or grandparents to see how much trouble it is to install an application and keep it up to date. The advertising revenue model has also reduced costs considerably, allowing people access to high quality software that may have been out of reach a few years ago with the traditional shrinkwrap software model.

One area that concerns me these days with respect to RIAs is the lack of consistent design patterns. The benefits of desktop applications come from the guidelines that have been developed for the two most popular platforms (Windows, Mac OS). The applications that run on those platforms have consistent menu placements and consistent behaviour (not always, but they're pretty good). The free form nature of the web and the lack of design patterns for RIAs has given us applications that are completely different and hard for people to learn. That's one thing I think that Adobe could play more of a leading role in.

RIAs are still a new concept, and are maturing as any other technology. Ryan points this out by comparing RIAs now to Super Mario Bros. As they mature in technology, they'll enable new applications to be delivered as RIAs, even some applications that today we couldn't imagine in the browser. Anne uses Photoshop as an example in her post. How much longer before Fauxto reaches that level of functionality? If Super Mario is any indication, its not going to be too long.

After my post yesterday about iJigg, I stated that Flash was one of the best tools for audio on websites. We've already seen what Flash has done for video online, but it appears that audio is the next thing that Flash will dominate.

TechCrunch has another story today (that's two in the past two days) about MOG, a social networking site for music fans that is using Flash for embedding audio in websites.

It does seem as though audio got skipped on the web. Yes, we had some podcasts for a while, but video was quick to take over everyone's attention. Are we finally getting to the point where audio on the web will be as pervasive as video? As will Flash dominate that area as much as video?

Flash Player 8 kicked off this revolution, allowing people to display video and play audio to anyone with Flash Player, and with great codecs to boot. I think we'll see the same type of revolution in a few months thanks to Flash Player 9, Flex and Apollo. The improvements in FP 9 allow people to develop rich Internet applications that weren't even possible a year ago, with the benefit that most of the people on the Internet can use them (something that can't be said for many other technologies).

Flash Player 8 kicked off a multi-media revolution online, with video and now audio based websites. Flash Player 9 will do the same for RIAs. What application are you going to build?