Why Sliderocket Could Be So Awesome, and Why It Isn’t

I wrote the other day about wanting a better way to share slide presentations.  I think there is a huge opportunity here, and I don’t think anyone has nailed it yet.

I consider this to be an open letter to Sliderocket, which is so close to capturing this opportunity but has (in my humble opinion) made a few key mistakes that will prevent it from succeeding.

First, the opportunity: every day, all around the world, people give presentations (keynote powerpoint, etc), in meetings, at conferences, and lots of other gatherings.  There are a LOT of ideas communicated this way on a daily basis.  So many.  The sum total of the knowledge included in the world’s daily powerpoint output is really really big (regardless of your beliefs on power corrupting and powerpoint corrupting absolutely).

This output is typically received in a few ways:

• by the people in the room, who get it in real time
• by others, via some sort of sharing, like when:
  • the slides themselves are posted to a site like Slideshare,
  • a video of the talk is posted online (for instance, here are all the great talks from this year’s Personal Democracy Forum).

This is a decent start, but it’s way limiting.  It’s probably a safe guess that something like 10% of all presentations given on a daily basis are archived in a useful online format.  And the online formats available now aren’t actually all that useful.

BUT – given where we are now with technology and the social web, there’s an opportunity to fill this gap.   My ideal tool would look like this:

1) Awesome, in-browser editing.  In-browser editing is critical – when you’re creating your content in-situ (see Fred’s good post on this idea here), you can then share, edit, re-share, embed, etc., straight from there.  The editing experience should feel great, just like Keynote does, and should ideally be implemented in HTML5, giving it a native in-browser feel (just like the beautiful Moqups).

2) Super easy audio recording.  If I’m making a deck for a talk I’m giving somewhere, I’ll gladly spend the extra time to do a run-through of audio recording for the online version (as I did with my talk at last week’s awesome summit).

3) A handful (don’t need a ton) of addons that are native to the web — analytics, interactivity, embedding, etc.

4) Social – so you can get feedback, collaborate, connect with others, etc.

5) Interoperable – exports to keynote, powerpoint, pdf, youtube, etc.

But what about Slideshare?, you might ask.  Slideshare was the pioneer in the get-your-powerpoints-online space, but their approach is not web-native or in-situ.  They have lots and lots of content, but it’s basically crippled without voiceovers (and to a lesser extent, interactivity).  They took a stab at it with slidecasts, but it was pretty half-hearted, and it’s just plain cumbersome to do (record your own timed MP3 and upload).

What about Prezi? Prezi is nice and can create some really beautiful things.  I loved Sascha Meinrath’s prezi from PdF.  Prezi could be great — downsides I see are that it’s a radical paradigm shift with a steep learning curve (not that big a deal), and it still doesn’t support audio as far as I can tell (correct me if I’m wrong).  But we’re getting warmer.

What about Sliderocket?   There is a reason why I’m calling out Sliderocket in the title of this post.  It’s because they are SO CLOSE, yet SO FAR AWAY.  The vision for the Sliderocket product is wonderful, hitting most of what I outlined above, but the execution sorely misses the mark.  Twice now, I’ve put real effort into switching from Keynote to Sliderocket — against my own reservations about some of the issues I’ll list out below — and each time I gave up, before switching back again because it’s exactly what I want.  But in the end, after saying all of the below privately to their customer support team, I just got too frustrated and gave up.

First, the good:

• Online editor that decently approximates the keynote/powerpoint experience (with a few key downsides which I’ll get to in a sec)
• All kinds of interactivity built in — surveys, popups, comments, etc.
• Collaboration: both on the editing side (for teams) and the public side (comments etc)
• Live embeds with analytics — see who’s watching, how long they’re looking at each slide, etc.  Awesome and amazing.
• Easy sound recording.

So, you might say: wait a minute, they’ve done absolutely everything you’ve asked for!  And you’re right, they have.  It’s so awesome.  Yes.  Except: at every single turn, and whenever they have an opportunity, they make choose to make your life harder, not easier, and they make you hate the service, not love it. For example:

• Crappy flash UI — they’ve built out tons of features, but all using a really clunky flash UI that feels neither like the browser nor like the desktop.  It’s worse than the web, AND it’s worse than the desktop.  It just doesn’t feel good to use — it’s just a little to slow, just a little too unresponsive.   And things tend to break (like this).If that were the extent of it, I could handle it — and I’d be a sliderocket convert, despite having to get used to a UI that’s not as great as it could be.  The real kicker, though, is that sliderocket focuses all their attention on a) locking you in and b) goosing you up to their pro plan.   And they do it in the most frustrating and manipulative way.  For example: