Gnomedex, bloggers and rich internet applications

I'm on the bus so posting will be a bit light over the next couple of weeks but I'm trying to keep up with news feeds so if anything big happens I'll be on it. Since Marc did his write up of Gnomedex I thought I should follow and give it a slant for the RIA community. It was my first Gnomedex, which is billed as "the blogosphere's conference" and my general impression is that the mainstream bloggers are still 6-9 months away from really getting rich internet applications. That isn't to say there aren't some rays of hope. I think Robert Scoble gets it and Marc joining Curl shows that he's both excited about RIAs and investing a portion of his future in them, but what passes as the A-list doesn't seem to have RIAs on its radar. None of the speakers spoke about anything RIA related (though the JibJab guys use a lot of Flash).

You may not see Jason Calacanis or Dave Winer talking about rich internet applications any time soon but one of my big takeaways was that there is a groundswell of bloggers and web community members who are starting to see the benefit. I randomly sat next to a couple of guys who were building a Flex application and they were stoked when they heard I was from Adobe. I also had a really great conversation with Richard Treadway (also working for Curl) about the push data model for RIAs, something we're working to evangelize with Flex Data Services. It was also cool to see people use the EyeJot stand and get some exposure to Flex, AIR and a video-centric RIA.

I think one thing that will help is continuing to make a stronger case for RIAs in a variety of verticals. We've seen huge growth in the consumer space and we're starting to see a lot of exciting productivity applications as well. Making people's lives easier with RIAs will go a long way towards getting bloggers to talk about it. Another thing we need to keep doing is making a case for RIAs inside the enterprise. We should be connecting the dots between RIAs and service oriented architecture (SOA) to show how they enhance each other. We should also talk about the benefits of real time messaging in the enterprise and the gain that rich clients combined with a push data strategy can bring you. The foundation is there, it's just a matter of hashing out the ideas.