experience matters

In the last week of April, I attended the “MTV Jackass on AIR” presentation on the FITC Toronto and I found the technology aspect and the marketing idea behind it both very interesting.

The creators describe the application as a “Casual Social Game”, in which users send “virtual pranks” to their friends. The characters of Jackass then invade the victim’s desktop and mess with it in several ways (most of them result in the desktop virtually dirty with some disgusting fluid). There’s also integration with Facebook.

Whether you like the MTV show or not, it’s necessary to admit that there are, from a technology standpoint, some interesting elements involved:

• The user doesn’t need to have the browser open in order to participate (receive the prank). That means more time and less restrictions of exposition to the application. The user can even set the application to run every time the operational system is started

• Once activated, the application can manifest at anytime while the computer is on. That, though invasive, can provoke a surprise effect that captures the attention of the user. The invasive aspect is diminished once the option to leave the AIR application is a user’s choice.

• The application can communicate with a server, bringing to the user updated content at any time.

Given the elements above, it’s not hard to start having ideas about how they can be combined to create different types of applications that will live in the user’s desktop but will act like regular in-browser content. Some of them are:

• News, posts, offers and any kind of content feeds

• Complete transactional applications

• Games

• Data-enhanced Mapping

Macromedia changed the way we see the web since the introduction of Flash in 1996, and thirteen years later, even with all the open web defenders’ criticism, it still doesn’t have any widely adopted competitor.  So it’s hard to think that AIR (introduced in 2007) will be less successful, specially because it’s based on established Internet formats, as Flash, ActionScript, HTML and JavaScript.  As it becomes more popular (100 million installations around the globe, as of February 2009), we slowly take the next step on the Internet era: the online experience off the browser.

eBay, AOL and Nick.com are already betting on the desktop experience, and the AIR platform is a great opportunity for branding using rich applications for a lot of others. And digital agencies are the bridge to bring these great off-browser interactive experiences to life.