I am simply amazed by the lack of involvement with companies and social media. Maybe it is really just a lack of general knowledge about what social sites like Facebook can do for their brand. Take the free Facebook fan pages for example. The best feature about them is that they are free and they allow people to become a fan of your product or your company.

Lets say you have a product called "carx". You take "carx" and create a nice .com site for it with campaigns that drive traffic to it, etc. That all takes money, sure that is fine, but for free you can do much the same thing, but using word of mouth to drive traffic to your site and help you build brand identity.

Here are a couple of things you may not have known about a fan page:

• It is indexed by google, whereas groups are not.
• You can add custom bits of FBML code that allows you to customize the group page, which you can't do with groups.
• You can add applications, which you can't do with groups.
• You can restrict the fan page so that only you can post information, basically turning off the ability to allow fans to add content. This lets the fan page function much as a normal website does, allowing you to dish out content.

I do think that companies and agencies alike are missing an opportunity here to grow into social markets and take hold of the brand identity on those sites. I have seen lots of user generated fan pages for products. While that is great, the company has no control over what is posted on those fan pages and some of those pages have hundreds of thousands of fans. If the company that owned that product had been the one creating that page they would have had control over messaging for their brand.

I guess that is the thing about situations like this. If you don't get on the boat fast enough, it will sail and leave you standing on the dock. If you have questions about Facebook fan pages, feel free to ask me below and I will be happy to help.

I have a big ColdFusion 8 tag poster to give away. I will randomly select a name from the comments on this post and send you the poster.

It is the same ColdFusion 8 tag poster that can be seen here:

Rules: You can only post one time, multiple posts don't count...

Hopefully we will get some more things we can give away soon!!

I recently asked this same question on a few of the LinkedIn groups that I run and was surprised by some of the responses I got back. While some have adapted to FDT or other apps like Flash Develop, there are still others that are still editing Flash content and AS on the Flash IDE. I think that those that are still developing AS on the Flash IDE are just asking for a headache.

Here were a couple of the responses I got:

"I use Sepy, but now testing FlashDevelop. I don´t understand eclipse, because is hard to configure. Maybe in a future will migrate to it."

"FlexBuilder - is everything I need in one app! It will handle AS projects along with Flex and Air - and comes with all of that Eclipse goodness. Have used SEPY in the past but keep coming back to FB."

"I actually code AS direct on Flash, but always use external AS files..."

"I have to agree with the majority here...I work in Flash itself for the most part. I've recently found myself using Coda more, but it is nice to work within the same IDE."

"I've been using FlashDevelop for a while. Not all the bells and whistles of FlexBuilder, but pretty decent (and its free). I also use Notepad++ for times when I just want a quick-opening file editor."

So what do you think? What do you use to develop Flash? Post your comments here.

If you want to read more of the responses you can view them on LinkedIn:

Flash Group on LinkedIn

Flash Coders on LinkedIn

Want to contribute to this blog? I would be more than happy to give you an account to publish RIA related articles.

If so send me an email at jeff[dot]fall[@]gmail[dot]com

In advertising it is very easy for you to get left behind.  This is especially true when it comes to advertising in the interactive market.  The more traditional agencies are now left in a catchup game to agencies like R/GA, Digitas, Big Spaceship, AKQA and the like.  In many cases agencies like Ogilvy and others have resorted to layoffs to get rid of the more traditional ad people.  Those "old guard" agencies are now struggling to re-organize to meet the demands that this digital marketplace requires.

The digital shift in these older agencies leaves lots of room for employees at some of these smaller digital shops to transition to somewhere that their talents can make more of a difference.  Sure someone could just be another Producer at lets say Digitas or AKQA, but they could jump ship and get in on the ground level of the re-organization of these larger agencies and become a Senior or Executive level producer.  While that person may have been struggling to get their voice heard at the digital agency, that same person could get in and make significant changes to the business model of these former traditional agencies.   Instead of being just another one of the masses at the digital shop, they get to be one of the few.

While I am not an advocate of people leaving a job unless you are really unhappy, there does come a point when you have to ask yourself some hard questions.  Questions come to mind like, "Can I go there and really make my mark?"  "Does anyone here value my opinion as an expert or am I just one of many?"

I guess the same thing is true of any large shift for an industry.  Look at the recording industry.  They resisted change for so long and now that they are embracing the technology they are having to play catchup to the other players in the market.  This can really be seen by taking a look at Napster.  The RIAA resisted napster and resisted music without DRM.  It has come full circle though and now Napster is back online with a library full of non-DRM'd music.

The ad industry is in that same sort of flux right now.  The older more traditional agencies were slow to adopt the new technologies and clung to their existing business model and structure.  Now they are shedding that weight and trying to scramble to embrace the new technologies/structure.

The real question is, "Can you teach the old guard new tricks?".   Or is it too late?

Have you ever wanted to have your google sitemap updated on the fly based on your postings or other data? This is a simple but effective example:

<CFQUERY name="qFind" datasource="astores">
select * from astores_names
</CFQUERY>

<cfxml variable="mydoc">
  <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
    <cfoutput query="qFind">
      <url>
       <loc>http://www.thewarp.org/blog/store.cfm?site=#store_name#</loc>
       <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
       <priority>0.8</priority>
       </url>
    </cfoutput>
  </urlset>
</cfxml>

<!--- <cfdump var=#mydoc#> ---><CFCONTENT
TYPE="text/xml"
RESET="yes"><CFOUTPUT>#ToString(mydoc)#</CFOUTPUT>

An example can be seen here:

http://www.thewarp.org/store_xml.cfm

In silverlight you can easily add images thru the XAML or the classes (ie: c#)

To add it thru the XAML all you have to write is this:

 
<img Source="Picture.jpg" x:Name="MyImage" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" />

Here is the whole code:

 
 <usercontrol x:Class="SilverlightApplication1.Page"></usercontrol>xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Width="400" Height="300"&gt;
<grid Background="White" x:Name="LayoutRoot"></grid>
<img Source="Picture.jpg" x:Name="MyImage" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" />  
 
<button Content="Hello World!!" Width="200" Height="50" Click="onButtonClick" Background="Aquamarine" x:Name="test"></button>

You can see a demo here: demo

Next I will explore a third party class TWEENER, that works very similar to the TWEENER class build for ActionScript.

http://www.shu-player.com/ 

"Shu enables you to increase the power and reach of Adobe AIR. With Shu your AIR applications can quickly be converted into standalone applications to run on PC or Mac machines without the AIR runtime installed! Shu applications can also be run from a CD or network share and do not require installation.

In addition Shu provides you the developer with a toolkit of commands to extend the system capabilities of your AIR application, features include, controlling external applications, opening external files, database connectivity and control, system path retrieval and screen capture functionality. With Shu you can now truly harness the power of your AIR applications from the desktop and beyond!"

Yahoo’s has announced that Flickr is going to start hosting video content. The photo sharing site already has over 25 million members who have collectively uploaded over 2 billion photos and now they want your moving-photos.

Yahoo says:

We spoke to our members, took surveys, played with very many video experiences on the web, and, of course, took lots of video. Through the process, we learned a few surprising things:

Most videos being captured today are essentially “long photos” — short clips that are captured on digital still cameras or mobile phones rather than long format video taken by traditional video cameras

People aren’t sharing these clips much. If they are, it’s either via playback on their camera, DVD, or sending a large email file.

While certainly there is video being shared on the web, most of it is re-broadcast content, such as clips from TV shows. If it’s user recorded content, much of it is material that is trying to be like broadcast content.

The video equivalent for the personal, authentic moments that are the hallmark of photos found on Flickr is actually pretty tough to find.

There area lot of phone photos that are sent directly to Flickr - maybe now the video content from these phones have a home too.

Flickr Video Pool

When using webservice classes in an "actionscript-only" Flex project, you have to make sure to include these lines of code before anything else in you class:

 
 var resourceManagerImpl:Object = ApplicationDomain.currentDomain.getDefinition("mx.resources::ResourceManagerImpl");
 Singleton.registerClass("mx.resources::IResourceManager", Class(resourceManagerImpl));
 

If you don't include this code you will get an error like this:

 
Error: No class registered for interface 'mx.resources::IResourceManager'.
at mx.core::Singleton$/getInstance()
at mx.resources::ResourceManager$/getInstance()
 

This is due to a bug in Flex3 compiler, read more info on this bug here:  http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-12205