There’s an interesting post over on Ryan Stewart’s blog about SHARE, my favorite web service (sometimes) and my personal migraine (sometimes). Ryan wants to know why SHARE doesn’t get more love from bloggers, something I can’t really speak to. We do get quite a bit of usage, though. Anyhow, there was lots of great feedback in there which we’ve been discussing on our internal mailing list, but there was one comment from Marc Hughes I wanted to address more publicly:
I’m planning Adobe Share support for AgileAgenda (my scheduling app), but the thing that’s been keeping me from doing it is the beta status.
When it goes official, what will be the fee structure? Free? Free for a limited account, pay for more? Pay-only? How committed it Adobe to the technology? If nobody uses it will it be gone in a year?
Also, being able to embed the content in a web page is great, if you’re sharing one of the few supported formats. But what about custom file formats? I want to supply a custom swf that’s used as the embedded viewer.
First, its really cool that you’d like to support SHARE in AgileAgenda. This kind of integration is exactly the reason why we spent so much time building web services APIs.
Second, on the future: although I can’t make any guarantees that mean anything, the future of SHARE is pretty bright. There is some other software coming from Adobe that make use of the same web service APIs that you can get from SHARE today, so we are pretty darn confident that those APIs will still be around for some number of years to come (since we had to sign support commitments in blood).
Third, on custom file format viewers: this is something we’d definitely like to do, although there are some serious security issues around embedding third party SWF objects inside of our Flex UI which we’re still trying to figure out. So no dates for this functionality just yet. Anyone have any tips? Send them my way.
Fourth, and finally, SHARE itself is getting a little stale, in internet time anyhow: its been almost five months since our last major update. That’s way too long, and we’re going to try to make sure we have something cool to show every couple of months from now on. The good news is that some of the key features we talked about at MAX last October are literally just around the corner, driven in large part by the feedback we’ve received on SHARE to date. And I’m even more excited about the new UI functionality coming in the release after that, which I get to play with a little more every day.
Anyhow, I hope this helps people who are working with SHARE feel better about its future. Hopefully we’ll have more to talk about next week.
