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Story Telling: MovinDoc Platform
MovinDoc Platform
Abstract
MovinDoc lets you design interactive documents. The interactivity is not just client side but involves server too. For example, using this platform you can quickly construct a presentation which has a questionnaire at the end. The platform lets the viewer answer these and the creator to get the result and stats of the people who viewed and answered the presentation. It lets you do this and more without any need of hosting or coding.
MovinDoc strong client side representation in addition to server side capabilities provides a quantum jump in the way documents are viewed and used today.
Introduction
Web content can be divided into two parts. One consisting of static content which includes all html, blogs, presentations, images. The second enables users to interact with each other; these can include social networking sites, multiplayer games and MMOGs. (What about things like web services?) We have many tools to generate the first kind of content while the interactive content is mainly custom build. Interactive content requires a server side representation, which requires difficult and time consuming server (side) implementations and deployment. Building multi-player games and interactive websites can be complex and time consuming process. There are several kits and platforms available in the market which can make building interactive content faster and easier but none of them makes it as simple as designing a html page. When we say interactive content in this document we mean the content which enables users to interact with each other almost instantly or over a time. Interactive content essentially comes with a server side representation.
Let consider two important technologies a) Flash platform and b) Second life (portal). Both these allow you to create content. Flash platform lets you create rich content which you can use on your website. Second life allows you to create more complex interactive content that can only be viewed at http://secondlife.com/ website. Now if we combine the two that is there are online tools to create rich interactive content and the created content can be embedded on your website, then what you have is MovinDoc.
Interactive content
There are several examples of objects which let users interact. These can be emails, form-based, game-objects etc. Some of these interactions are going to become obsolete as more and more people are connected to web and at most of the time. The emails as a indispensible means of communication a decade back is being replaced by more instant variety in the form of instant messengers and social networking sites.
Servinators
In MovinDoc platform the most important entity is a servinator. These are objects providing a specific interactive functionality and can be used in a MovinDoc like you use images in your presentations. A servinator can be a deck of cards, which deals out a card when you click on it. Mind you it is no ordinary deck, once you drop it in your document anyone viewing it, sees the same card dealt out. Ola ! we have a poker game built in a minute by just dropping this deck servinator on a blank background and asking your friends to join in ! We can have a laser blaster servinator, an instant messaging servinator, etc. So what is the big deal? MovinDoc platform provides fully online tools to assemble and publish such servinators at lightening speed. A fully online IDE with server support results in rapid development and deployment of such servinator enabled documents. The IDE helps you in testing these objects and then making them available to the community or letting you use it to power your own documents.
Stories
Now that we have coined a word for the server enabled objects we should look for a word to define these documents that are churned out by this platform. ‘Stories’ looks like an appropriate word to define these sophisticated documents. MovinDoc platform will be powering these stories like Flash plug-in powers the flash documents. Although it is as simple as the flash platform to run, the similarity ends here. The MovinDoc platform “server” enables these stories.
MovinDoc Plug-in
MovinDoc plug-in is a small highly optimized download which sits in your browser or outside it, powering your stories with server facilities available in the MovinDoc server cloud. It also provides a framework for animation. It lets you login, give access to an instance of the story you want to view, authenticates etc. The plug-in keeps the version of the story updated as and when the changes are made by the author.
Figure 1: A bird eye view of the platform.
Story Server
Story server is highly scalable, distributive, fault tolerant system. It has a database of stories which are versioned. The versioning helps in providing the latest story to the user demanding it. It has sophisticated story instance manager which creates an instance of the story once an existing story reaches its prescribed number of users. It also removes an instance if it is inactive for a while.
A sophisticated servinator manager allows the IDE to install and manage these server side objects.
Servinators Vs Web Services
Web services have been around for some time. Most of them are XML packaging of existing HTML content like a stock quote service or a search service. Then there are storage services like Simple DB from Amazon. The focus of web services is more on the exposing server side capabilities to the world, but these hardly provide a framework for interaction or capability of defining visual representation. Let us take a web service which deals a card. You call this and you get the next card. There are two things missing here to make it meaningful:
- An environment where many people can share it to get the same outcome.
- A strong client side representation so that it can be enjoyed visually.
A servinator overcomes these limitations.
Example
Apart from many new uses, MovinDoc will have an impact on the following:
Presentations
The presentation will be powered by servinators. Apart from usual stuff you may put a feedback form at the end or a poll. You can create such presentation using online tools and then you can email it to your audience. The audience will see and interact with it. The data generated as in answers to your poll or feedback is presented to you in your MovinDoc console.
Data Services
There are several companies providing data services over the web. Amazon is foremost among these. Google Docs provide document storage service. These are simplifying the task of storing and maintaining data in secure environment. You still need programmers to make use of it.
One logical step forward to make this even more useful for the end user, which most of the time is a small website owner, is to provide a “form” service. A form abstracts all the complexity and provides a construct, which the end users can use as is on his website.
A “form” is just a simple implementation of a servinator on MovinDoc platform published to the end-user’s website. The end-user gets access to all the submitted data as XML in his MovinDoc console.
Think of “Form To Go”. To conduct a survey you can mail this embedded form to the audience without the need of a website or programming.
Blogs
Now let us take current blogs. There are several websites providing blogs. You publish a blog to a website and it provides you with features like the feedback or the comments by the readers. To share you can pass the link to your blogs to your friends or embed them to your website.
MovinDoc will not only make blogs more engaging as they add a whole dimension of interactivity to the documents. So you can have blogs which are not just sequence of pages but like a map, the reader can appear as an avatar in your blogs and can interact with items placed in the blogs, can chat with other users happen to be reading it at the same time and can leave his comments for others to see.
The blog owner gets a report on the visits, demographics, comments and chat transcript and can monitor his blogs by appearing as an avatar inside it and taking view of people trying to do certain thing in the blog maybe trying to take a poll (again a servinator). He will also know instantly what kind of people read his blogs by looking at their custom avatars!
Social networking
People can create there own custom lounges and maybe set these as there desktop. They can customize these lounges at any time and these changes are made available to people visiting a person’s lounge almost immediately. His friends can just come to his lounge on his birthday and cut a cake (servinator), Or they can play a quiz game with a quizzing servinator. What his friends will see will be a reflection of the owners personality with his photographs, social calendar, doors to his contact’s lounges etc.
Story Telling and RPG’s
With such powerful set of tools you will no longer be expressing yourself with writing textual stories but much more engrossing content which the reader’s avatar can explore rather than plain reading.
The potential customers
Almost anyone creating more than just the static content. This is especially useful for small businesses that are looking for presenting more compulsive content to their user then the present web allows. It will save cost in that the business need not go for collocated or dedicated servers instead use MovinDoc to provide them server power. MovinDoc does it relatively cheap, grows as per demand and takes away the burden of maintaining such servers. This will be useful for portals to present the content in much powerful way, collect more meaningful statistics about the visitors and provide content which customizes itself as per the visitor’s preferences. Almost anyone can use it to quickly put together a game, a story in which his friends or clients can play a role or a greeting card with a mailbox for thank you note. We will not hesitate to call it a disruptive technology.
That is a brief description about the platform. The platform is feasible. A prototype of this is available at http://www.MovinDoc.com. The devil is in the details, which is being tamed as we speak.
