Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now
- MY BACK PAGES

A year ago I had a dream that I was having an intimate chat with Steve Jobs about newspaper and magazine applications. “All the news apps currently out there “, he said after a thoughtful pause, “are shit. Why on earth should I have to wait tens of seconds, or even minutes, after I start the app before I can see the first page of my publication?”

“Well, Steve-o”, I said. “The main problem is that we can’t quietly download issues in the background. The only way we can do that is shiftily declare our app as a VoIP app in which case we get some background capability. But it only works after starting and stopping the app, and your digilent App Reviewers would reject the app anyway.”

“Good point, Boofie, good point”, he said. “I think I better fix that.”

And, with the release of Newsstand for iOS 5, he did.

Newsstand is here

Newsstand was announced this week as part of the fanfare that was the WWDC 2011. In essence, a new icon will appear on the home screen of all users and will be used as a folder to store edition based content. It looks rather similar to the iBooks apps. One big difference is that iBooks is an app that one needs to download from the App Store. Newsstand is baked into the operating system.

End Users: Newsstand is a Clever Folder

From the point of view of an end user, Newsstand behaves like an iOS folder. Previously, each news application you had would sit on your home screens like any other app. Now, news apps will instead sit inside the Newsstand folder/application. This will give a few nice user interface advantages too. Instead of a generic icon for the publication, Newsstand will show the cover of the latest issue. And it will be able to tell you if a publication is new, and send you push notifications when a new issue is ready for your reading pleasure. As I understand it, publishers can choose to ignore newsstand completely and submit apps as they’ve always done. But if they do this, they won’t get the benefits of the new API that apps in the Newsstand can use.

Developers: Newsstand is an API for background download

For me, this is the cool part. Steve has come good on his promise. If, when developing your application you register as a Newsstand application, you get access to the NewsstandKit.framework. This lets you do two new things. Firstly, it lets you add and remove issues from the Newsstand application on the user’s home screen. Secondly, and most importantly, it lets you download your new editions in the background, even if the app isn’t running in the background. So the user will wake up in the morning, and your new edition will already be on his device. #FTW

Apart from this new API, you write your apps in exactly the same way. You submit them to the App Store in exactly the same way, and they are downloaded from the App Store in exactly the same way. So developers of stand alone news applications don’t need to worry about Apple stepping on their toes. iOS 5 is wonderful news for them, not a competitor.

It seems that there are some things that the API won’t support yet. It’ll work great if you’re a title that publishes weekly or daily like the good old print days. It isn’t clear how it will help if you want constantly updated content pushed to your daily edition – it appears that every background download job relats to a whole issue, a.k.a. a new icon in the Newsstand. We’ll need to dig deep to see how this can be done.

Publishers: Newsstand doesn’t change the publishing workflow, or economics

Newsstand does not provide any authoring tools, so you create editions in the same way you’ve always done. If you’ve got an existing standalone application, not a huge amount changes. You’ll still pay Apple their 30% as you do at the moment. Your users will still pay for your editions through the App Store or through In-App Purchases.

There seems to be a common misconception that people can discover edition based content (news, magazines, etc) through Newsstand. Now I don’t believe this is true. Newsstand will only show you titles that you have downloaded already. However, there probably will be a new way to search these titles through the App Store, which will create a new little market dynamic all on it’s own. I guess there might well be a view of the App Store embedded into Newsstand like there is for iBooks at the moment.

Winners and Losers

It’s a sad fact of life that OS-baked app “innovations” from the big boys will destroy smaller players that have a competitive product. From my perspective, the winners here are the end users, publishers and developers of stand-alone news applications. Companies like Adobe (with their Digital Publishing Suite) and those that create tools that sit on top of InDesign to create standalone apps (Woodwing, Mag+, Aquafadas, etc) are largely unaffected, unless they had an idea they could also create their own store front.

The losers are the poor sods that are creating aggregator readers and charging outside of the App Store. I’m thinking mainly of people like poor Zinio who I think are going to struggle. For publisher consortiums that are more about the relationships than the technology (for example Next Issue Media), things might still be okay if they just adopt the new technology. We mustn’t forget that iOS isn’t the only platform out there and that Android is becoming increasingly important. But, for 2011 at least, iOS is really the only platform out there that matters.

And a Shameless Plug

And for those of you that don’t know, my new company is working on a hybrid iOS/HTML5 based reader called Pugpig. We’re lauching very very soon, so follow @thepugpig for the latest news. Here is a sneaky screenshot of our Pugpig Guide sample book in the Newsstand.

Disclaimer: The API may change before iOS 5 gets released, so I might be completely wrong about all of this. And, in my dream, Steve didn’t actually use the word “shit”.

When all of your advisers heave their plastic
At your feet to convince you of your pain
Trying to prove that your conclusions should be more drastic
Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?
- QUEEN JANE APPROXIMATELY

Right, sheeple – it’s time to learn something from the Great McBoof. Normally you’d expect to pay somewhere between $5000 and $10000 for this kind of information in some top secret report. But here it is, completely free. Steal it all when your CIO demands your white paper on Trends for Next Year, or to impress your friends at your local #LastThursdayCMS. So, without further ado, I guess you McBoof’s Predictions For Content Management In 2011.

#1 – Names Remain Sacred: Ridiculous crapronyms like WEM and CEM will vanish. Those that invented them will scuttle back in shame, only to crawl back with some new ones. But the CMS twitterati are a wiley bunch, and aren’t easily fooled. I’ll try to write a blogpost later about why these crapronyms are so bad, but I’m currently surrounded by four babies with the norovirus (not pleasant), and this is a story that deserves to be told properly.

#2 – Return To Core Competencies: New highly-focussed kickass products will appear in areas into which the CMS vendors tried to encroach. The vendors will feel a bit stupid, stop building monoliths and focus on the stuff they’re good at. They’ll embrace integration again. The areas include analytics, MVT, search, image manipulation, transcoding and community. Most will be *aaS and easily integrated. Kiss your custom CMS tracking module, A/B testing module, forum module, twitter module, image resize module and full text search module goodbye. They’re going to look pretty shit compared to what’s coming.

#3 – Focus on APIs: The API will take centerstage in 2011. The next versions of most CMSs will be properly architected for them. A product will be judged by the quality of the API it exposes. The really good news is that this will properly re-establish the split between content management and content delivery. Portals will be portals again. And there will be much rejoicing. Vignette DPM will be unofficially axed. And there will be even more rejoicing. All APIs will become HTTP based. CMIS will play a relatively small role in 2011. The vendors will all claim their APIs are RESTful, although only a handful really will be. Note that there is nothing wrong with these slightly dirty, non-RESTful APIs. I’d rather have dirty than SOAP. And SOAP is going away. Can you believe the S stands for Simple.

#4 – Enemies Will Stop Sleeping Together: 2010 had a good few CMS aquisitions that didn’t make sense. Vendors that had many overlapping products acquired one another or merged. None of these were a good idea, so 2011 won’t repeat this. No chance of either the speculated Microsoft – Adobe or Interwoven – Open Text jokes happening. Note that yours truly does still think the Adobe – Day deal was smart, but they didn’t have overlapping products.

#5 – New Auth Protocols: FaceBook Connect is going to become important to the CMS vendors. It’ll be a checkbox on RFPs. Which sucks, but I’m sure Nostradamus didn’t like all his predictions either. OpenID and OAuth aren’t going to set the world alight in 2011.

#6 – RFPs Continue to Waste People’s Time: The CMS choir will continue to all sing that big fat RFPs are not the way to effectively select a product. And this will continue to fall on deaf ears and we’ll continue to see these dumbass, energy sapping, pointless documents arriving in our inboxes.

#7 – A Storm Cloud Brewing: Vendors start to properly understand the cloud. They’ll all architect their software for it. Amazon will be dominant. The smarter CMS vendors will provide EC2 instances all installed and ready to go. I must confess I only properly understood it early this year.

#8 – Real Multichannel Delivery: The success of the iPad (and, I predict, the Samsung Galaxy Tab) will mean vendors start thinking about multichannel again properly. 2011 will be the year Android becomes really important. Even Windows Phone 7 might start to matter a bit. In fact, we might get people saying “Digital Content Managament” instead of “Web Content Management”. Which would be yet another craproymn as that is what good old “Content Management” is.

#9 – And Multichannel Authoring: It won’t just be delivery to the tablets and smartphones. It’ll be authoring too. In 2011, half the vendors will write web apps while the other half will write native apps to show off their mobile authoring platforms. By 2012, 80% will be writing web apps.

#10 – The Crew Trumps The Product: The realisation will hit home about why the implementation is still more important than the product choice. There will be some attempts to start SI/Agency reviews or reports, but I don’t think they’ll take off until 2012.

Bonus CMS Prediction: 2011 Is Gonna Be Fun: The CMS Twitter community will continue to be insane and a good laugh. We’ll drink lots of beer together. @pmonks will not grow up, @irina_guseva will retain her title as CMS Queen, @piewords will remain the voice of reason, @justincormack will still write very well thought out posts not often enough. Those pesky analysts will continue to stir things up and keep us occupied. The well-meaning vendors will continue to sprout marketing bullshit. And I’ll continue to be completely wrong about absolutely everything.

Bonus Christmas Prediction: No new Christmas song will be released that will come even close to Fairytale of New York – by far and away the best Christmas song ever written. The lyrics are brilliant enough to bring tears to my eyes , the music Irish and folky and Shane MacGowan is the ugliest bastard you’re ever likely to see in a music video. Listen to THIS three times and I’ll buy you a beer if you aren’t in love with it.

As usual, comments and flames much appreciated. Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.

Where were you when it started
Do you want it for free
What was it you wanted
Are you talking to me?
- WHAT WAS IT YOU WANTED?

Right. It’s the iPad and, obvious jokes aside, I think the device is going to revolutionise more than just reading on the toilet.

Here’s the thing – the iPad is just too damn beautiful for shit content. I think this is the best thing that has happened to publishing for a long long time. People will pay for content on this baby, and on other devices that follow. Be assured, they will follow, just like they followed the iPhone. I wouldn’t disrespect my iPad (that someone is sure to send me as a gift) by reading machine-generated advertorial crap on it. I want to read good content written by people that are paid to write. And I’d be happy to pay a small fee for this – for books, newspapers, magazines, video and the hybrids of these that are going to emerge.

We recently saw a lot of people paying for the Guardian iPhone App, although I don’t understand how a one-off payment for content is sustainable. We need a way to do in-app recurring payments, which should be relatively easy. Murdoch’s threat to remove News Corp content from Google and start charging for it makes more and more sense. And all you people that scream about content being free – consider the BBC web site for a second. They produce wonderful content, which is paid for by every citizen in the UK as part of our taxes, and I don’t think many people begrudge them this.

There will also be people that scream “Damn You, @McBoof. How could you write about the joys Open Data and Open Standards then embrace a Paywall. Judas!”. To those I say, “Trust Me, Open does not always mean Free”. More on this another time.

A last thought on the iPad. The fact that it doesn’t have a camera doesn’t bother me at all. The lack of Flash is a small issue, but I don’t like Flash much. No USB port sadly – the device is still too closed for me. And it needs to multitask, and I got the impression from what I’ve seen so far that it doesn’t. That sucks a bit. Still, I want one.

Let’s close on a video from 2006 (thanks to @halvorson):