I’ve seen a lot out of Sun recently, and I’m not sure if I’m simply more attuned to it, or if the company is trying to up its profile. First there was the woman I met at DEMOfall from Sun who talked about her team of colleagues walking the show promoting Java. Then there was reading about Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog. (It’s been around since 2004 – where have I been?) Then there was Sun’s big announcement in November about the official Open Sourcing of Java. And now there’s The Big Mashup.
Sun sent out a press release last week on its new “unique online experience” that’s supposed to show how Internet technologies are converging online and creating a “Participation Age.” This is a wagon that many companies are trying to hitch their carts to – the concept of convergence, new ways for people to interact and be entertained, etc. Sun’s Mashup sounds like a reasonably good idea, but its goals are nebulous at best, and currently the execution is seriously lacking.
If the Big Mashup is meant to be a participatory, multimedia form, it’s got a ways to go. The press release talks about a documentary, which is really a 12-minute video montage speaking at a very introductory level about new technology tools for user-generated media. The release also talks about a community blog, which I did not see anywhere. Instead there were individual blogs from industry notables, several of which linked to other sites, and some of which had very limited content.
Finally, Sun touted something called Snapp Radio, which brings together online music and Flickr images. (Everyone’s integrating Flickr…) A cool idea, but it requires registration with online music sites, and it appears to me to be more of a novelty than anything else.
So The Big Mashup isn’t much to look at, or listen to today. But it’s interesting to watch Sun forage into the great wide world of convergence communications. Is it purely marketing shtick, or will we see more out of Sun in the way of consumer-facing, media convergence efforts?