How soon will HTML5 become a preferred standard for online videos ?

Following the latest developments in internet video delivery, it seems that despite of sluggish response by major players ( Microsoft and Adobe), web videos will eventually break free from the clutches of plugin environment. What that means to different standards of rich media delivery is a topic of another discussion.  Here we will take a deeper look at the recent developments and their immediate implications.

Although HTML 5 is still in development stage, heavyweights (Apple and Google) are putting their weight behind it. The enthusiasm of 2 more major players Mozilla and Infibeam translates to a few more positive steps in the direction of plugin free video delivery.

Microsoft has been a little behind the curve in embracing emerging technologies of late, its resistance against an openly owned standard has partly been because of its efforts to push its own Silverlight video plugin as a web standard.
All major browser’s Safari, Chrome , Opera and Firefox have been actively involved in shaping the new standard. Internet explorer, despite of its initial resistance, is now extending full support to HTML5 videos, this is seen as a major boost as Internet explorer still has an enviable market share in the browser market , largely due to deep penetration of Microsoft’s windows Operating system.

If youtube’s opt-in trial is any indication, HTML5 may become mainstream sooner than what most experts predicted. Youtube has been an early user of H.264 codec and has pledged open support to WebM format. It may take them a while to discard flash completely. Things are obviously a little different for Apple, which has already discontinued flash support, forcing content developers to think of other ways to deliver content to the ever-increasing modern apple devices like ipad and iphone. Since apple is actually making the likes of you tube answer this need, the future of technologies not supported on these popular devices looks bleak, Flash will still have a role to play in the near future, but doesn’t look equipped enough for a long inning from here.

HTML5 player, being CSS and Javascript based, offers immediate advantages of player flexibility and resource economy. CSS and Javascript promise to make the player highly interactive in real-time, breaking free of the restrictive plugin based environments and since most plugins are known resource hogs, HTML5 based video delivery will hopefully be much lighter on your system.

Despite of the significant support given to this open standard by almost all major players, one shouldn’t hurry in writing the obituary of flash or Silverlight yet, despite of some advantages delivery over HTTP has its own restrictions which haven’t been addressed yet. Starting from a standard set of codecs, these restrictions stop heavy media distributors like You tube from migrating to the new standard completely.Though HTML5 is a tremendous development in taking videos to platforms not supported by flash, it still needs a lot of work to replicate Flash’s efficiency in delivery and distribution of videos . The overall adoption of the new standard is also a concern, since most websites over the internet allow only flash embedding, the switch to an open standard wont come all that naturally . Another concern the developers of HTML 5 need to answer is the limited support it offers to two-way audio-video communication, which is sublimely handled by Flash.

However, over the past few months HTML 5 has taken giant strides in shaking up the dominance of flash and other plug and play standards, it’s still in nascent stages and the future looks very promising, it would be exciting to see how soon it can become a universally accepted medium for delivering videos seamlessly across all browsers.

Why do people follow you on Twitter

Every one wants a million followers on twitter, with or without a motive. But then followers are there for a reason, they will follow you only if they have something to gain from it. So if you are not in one of the following categories, then  you are likely to struggle in reaching a fraction of what you aspire for. Not digging deep into the importance of followers or weather the number means anything at all in this post. Forgive the informal language, but i guess this post demanded it.

Twitter Follow Me

You are a celebrity.
Oh, yes, obvious one. You are a hot-shot celeb, who already has millions of fans who are only waiting for an opportunity to get in touch with you. As soon as you join  they start following you, or in some cases, join twitter just to follow you. Your followers are not really bothered about what you tweet, they see it as a channel through which they can reach out to you and direct pleasantries or brickbats at you.

You tweet about controversial topics.
Controversial content has worked for traditional media, no reason why it wont work for social media, even if it doesn’t do wonders to your popularity but taking regular potshots at things revered and respected by many people do enough to get you noticed, people follow you because they need to know what next are you coming up with.

You were mentioned by BBC.
Whoa, You were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time unwittingly tweeting about the US seals made your follower count surge past the 6 figure mark. Naturally you have made every effort since then to maintain their interest.

You give special offers that they cant afford to miss .
You happen to be a corporate blogger probably for a local deals company, or some really popular brand making offers that your followers find difficult to ignore. They follow you because your offers are relevant to them or they have this universal appeal.

You are a mass follower.
Ahan, you spend hours and hours in following everyone you come across, hoping at least half of them will follow you back. You usually don’t put half as much efforts in framing your tweets as much as in following people. You soon manage getting thousands of followers with the follower/ following ratio something like 1/10.  

You follow your followers back(everyone) .
You are similar to a mass follower, slightly lazier, instead of hunting for profiles to follow yourself. You simply post something like “ I follow back” on your bio or something like a #ifollowback hash tag into some conversation, in order to find more like minded users who can benefit mutually.

You represent a convenient channel of communication.
You are probably the online face of someone in authority, you make it easy for people to convey message to those who can act on your suggestions and bring some kind of positive change.

You have purchased followers.
You don’t really mind spending some cash in an ego massaging exercise like increasing your follower count. Either you overrate the value of follower count or plan to have a sizable number to start of substantially. Your followers have no idea about why they follow you, you don’t make their lives better in any way, but then you have made a payment to some app which presents the number as a proof of their result oriented efforts.

You represent customer care of some organization which is frequently abused.
Well, sympathies to begin with. Its not easy being a hockey goalkeeper without any protection, however you try your best to save the face of a company which simply does not care about its customers. Your efforts only make them feel some consolation after feeling let down by your company’s service.

Your followers are genuinely interested in what you say.
Your followers actually wait for every tweet, you have a knack of coming up with original views about the subject matter of your choice in a very captivating way, you know how to use the permissible 140 characters limit to your best advantage and usually have a very good understanding of your target

How to use Yammer to your best advantage

My Yammer fascination continues, hence this follow up to the earlier post Why Should you use yammer . Social media has caught up the fancy of the world for a reason, its fast easy and convenient. Even in a corporate set up its no different.

Here are the some of the ways of using yammer, or for that matter any other corporate socially connecting tool to maximize the potential of your organization.

Company Announcements : There isn’t any easier way to reach out to all your employees than declaring it on yammer, and once the feeds become more frequent employees will also find it very convenient to check for announcements.

Events: Participation in corporate events can be increased by using yammer not only to declare the events, but also in taking ideas in conducting it.

Member Introductions: Building up team spirit within the organization can be the most challenging aspect of running a business, it always helps if relevant background details of every new member are shared with the rest of the team in dispersed locations.

Opinions: You never know where a great idea may come from, a corporate social media is just the right platform to brainstorm and share ideas without doing extensive travelling, the best part is that even if too many ideas are generated in any session they are not lost and can be revisited for decision making purposes.

Client Spotlight : Educating your team about your clients can be just as important as educating them about the business, well documented client spotlights will also help the new members of the team in understanding them.

Competitor study: Similar to client spotlight, the competitors progress can be shared with the entire team to decide the future course of action and also get new ideas about which competitor strategy can be implemented.

Industry News: There’s a lot happening around us, in our industry which may be difficult for everyone to follow, hence if everyone can share the important aspects with the entire organization, it might help in saving a lot of time, while keeping many members in the organization updated.

On Job Tips: Everything from keyboard shortcuts to the latest fancy designing tools, which are likely to increase the productivity of the team, should necessarily be shared. Anything which makes the job of an employee easier or saves her time will help the organization move in the right direction – faster.

How companies  use Yammer :

Ask and answer questions: Anything from how to configure wi-fi on Alienware to how to apply for a leave can be asked and answered.

Use Groups to organize work and share domain specific knowledge: Staying continuously updated with relevant knowledge is easier when you work as a group, groups also help in archiving that information generated for future use.

Create Tags to organize content (#tag): Twitter users will be familiar with the concept of #tags, for starters # tags help in organizing content to make it more easily searchable when the information keeps growing continuously. #Marketing for instance may help members easily find Marketing related content shared on the site.

Share links to useful information: It’s pretty common to stumble upon useful information on the internet these days, plenty of it that you would like to share with your teammates, share them on yammer.

Share files, images: Files and images can be a part of the companies intellectual property( Logos, brochures, data sheets etc) or they can be files which are needed by employees for performing better.

Company Events: Events in a company can be planned and shared on your network.

Fly By tip: Yammer desktop is a bit heavy and short of some functionality of the web version, firefox plugin for yammer works nicely, give it a try if you are on Firefox.