I'm thrilled to announce the release of a new set of features on SlideSix that further our goal of becoming the premier multimedia presentation sharing community on the web. First and foremost in this release is support for external multimedia. This means that you can now perform a single search from within our management console that will look for matching videos on YouTube and Vimeo. Once you have found the video you'd like to embed you simply attach it to your slide and the video will be displayed as a new slide in your presentation. Many folks have asked for this feature and I believe that it has been implemented in such a way that is true to the core vision of SlideSix - easy to use but extremely powerful. In the spirit eating my own dog food, the following presentation provides a nice intro and overview of this exciting new feature:

Some discussions and reading recently have led me to ask myself this question. Do Fat Clients have a future in software development? I think they definitely serve a purpose and, in my opinion, can not fully be replaced by RIA's (yet). I see a trend developing - developers - and corporations think that the RIA can solve world hunger and fully replace the functionality of a traditional Fat Client. I don't think we're there yet. Granted the cost savings of a RIA compared to a Fat Client are probably very appealing (think of what it costs to push a patch to 250,000 machines compared to pushing a new version to the web) but I'm just not fully convinced that the technology, as it currently stands, is capable of this. I am not an expert analyst - this is just the observations of a lowly developer. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

I've been doing some thinking about 2.0 and the more I think about it, the more questions come up in my mind.

Why haven't we seen more 2.0 sites? Where is Google 2.0, Yahoo 2.0, Amazon 2.0, etc? There is such a vast amount of concepts that are "1.0" that could be done RIA style. Think about it - webmail, portals (though there have been some good ones coming out recently - for example, check out Netvibes), Blogs, search engines, etc, etc, etc...

Which leads me to my next question - Will developers and companies overdo 2.0? Do we NEED Rich blogs, search engines, and whatnot? Does every page have to use Ajax or Flash Remoting style data retrieval. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Huge Fan of not reloading the page, but at what point does it become overkill?

Question 3 - Are users ready for full fledged RIA web app's? Granted, some probably are, but what about those who aren't? Will developers adopt a 1.0/2.0 toggle button on their sites? Some folks are still rolling along at 28.8 dial up. Even if they were ready, there connections most likely aren't!

Question D - What's next? What will 3.0 be about? I'm no prophet, but I see a deeper convergence of PC/TV. The lines will become even further blurred between the TV and the Desktop. I think it's inevitable - as bandwidth gets higher, fiber gets pushed deeper into the neighborhoods and content providers become even hungrier for our hard earned dollars.