Come join us! #socialTV meetup on Wednesday hosted by @ConstellationTV http://t.co/OUnqLfCw
Inside FB on Orbitz 50 Faves: “really good at giving users the incentive to keep on playing and inviting more friends” http://t.co/l8tMPgG
Check out @adamjsimon’s blog post on the future of film: http://t.co/SJdhHtk
The Future of Film
A friend of mine was recently asked to be on a panel about the future of film for The Academy (yes, that one), and asked what I thought about where the industry was going in the next decade. Below are some of the thoughts which came spilling out once I got typing, in no particular order:
We’ll blur the lines between series of movies and series of television episodes pretty quickly. There will be a time when there is no meaningful distinction between the two.
The audience experience is going to become a lot more core to the creative process of filmmaking. We can’t assume that our audience is just watching a movie in a theater or on their TV anymore, and some of the most interesting work is going to come from incorporating the basics of user experience design into creating movies. This is already happening with 3D - we know that a viewer is having a different experience in a 3D theater versus their non-3D television set. And episodes from Mad Men’s next season will be 5 minutes longer on iTunes. But I fully expect different versions of a film to be “designed” for theatrical release, home viewing, mobile viewing, co-viewing, etc. It will be optimized for casual viewers, and will give true fans even more ways to give you their money.
Socialbomb at OSCon
We in Socialbomb Engineering had the pleasure of going to O’Reilly’s OSCon (Open Source Convention) again this year, and as expected, it was a great collection of open-source concepts, experts, and goodies. We even heard it was the biggest OSCon yet, with over 3500 people registered!
Socialbombers Adam Parrish and myself, along with Socialbomb album Brendan Berg, gave a talk called Tornado: Scalable, Non-blocking Web Servers for Fun and Profit, in which we outlined the things that make Tornado such a fantastic framework and how folks could make use of it for their own development. The crowd was wonderful, and we got a great conversation going around the advantages and problems to using it in production.
We made a quick link-shortener program (live!) to demo Tornado’s power and simplicity, and if you’re curious, you can snag the code here. Thoughts, edits, and questions are welcome!
Adam also did a second session called Teaching Creative Writing with Python, in which he outlined the things he’s learned from the creative-writing-with-Python course he teaches at NYU ITP. Not only did the room seem to love it, it even got picked up in ReadWriteWeb!
If you were there, we’d love to hear your thoughts on these talks or any others you saw, so drop us a line!
-Mike
RT @adamjsimon: In advance of tonight’s meetup: The Second Screen is the Social Screen http://t.co/dABwNw8
Don’t forget to check out the August #socialTV meetup tonight with our guest @attractv. http://t.co/P2gmtzq
The Second Screen is the Social Screen
At Socialbomb, we’ve worked on several different types of social TV apps, from sharing rich media related to time-shifted content in True Blood Live Feed, to co-viewing of live television in Skins Captionbomb. Unsurprisingly, all of our applications have been highly social - not just including a like button and a tweet button, but actually built from the ground up to integrate users’ friends and other viewers into the experience.
The 20th century involved, in some ways, a cultural shift toward getting accustomed to sitting in front of a screen. Whether it was a movie screen, our television or our computer, we spent a century learning how to sit in front of a glowing rectangle instead of a fire. And those rectangles became increasingly personal and interactive. The pull of time was toward lean-forward.
So far, the 21st century seems like it will be about learning to interact with multiple screens simultaneously, all of them personalized, all of them aware of each other. Today we’re starting with two screens, most commonly a smartphone and a television. You can imagine that, decades from now, when nearly every surface is a screen, this multi-screen literacy we’re developing will be a vital skill.
So how do we increase personalization? One way is with sensors, as we’ve seen each generation of smartphone become more and more aware of its context in the world. But that’s about it, not us. The way that we increase personalization for the user, right now, is social.
Our primitive lizard brains aren’t so equipped for modern technology. Subconsciously, we’ve developed a deep relationship between our friends and family, whom we use our smartphones to communicate with, and the phones themselves. Logically, that relationship extends to other things we do on our phones, and, combined with a cultural drive to bond over media, makes our second screens the ideal place to gather our friends and discuss the latest episode of Mad Men. We were doing this via text messages, emails, and tweets years before we had specialized apps for it, and we’ll continue to use those channels as long as they remain satisfying, often to the exclusion of any kind of official app.
There’s a lot of experimentation going on in the second screen space. No one’s nailed the experience so well that they’ve become a clear thought leader, let alone a market leader. It’s a question of what users want, what content owners can provide, and what technology makes possible. But the answer is most certainly social. It will look less like a DVD bonus disc with a like button, and more like a new software platform for social media, in the most “media” centric meaning of the term, providing deep integration of viewers into the content experience.
If you’re in NYC, come by our offices to talk about social media on the second screen at tonight’s SocialTV Meetup!
-Adam
RT @aparrish: hey check it out, there’s a readwriteweb post about my oscon talk on poetry and programming: http://t.co/ddQb0nY
At #OSCON today? Check out the #Tornado panel hosted by bombers @mike_dory @aparrish and @socialbomb alum @brendn http://t.co/EwHDVuS
