I have been programming computers for over forty years, but it is only relatively recently that the idea of computer applications as advertising tools has caught my attention. I imagine that if anyone had presented this idea to me twenty years ago, I might have joked, “This subroutine is brought to you by Ford Motor Company”. Yet computer applications have changed considerably over the past four decades and so must our understanding of how they may be used in advertising.

Today, Digiday: APPS will explore the issues with some of the brightest people in the advertising space. However, I would like to take a step back and look at it from a different vantage, the viewpoint of an old programmer.

Marketing and advertising people are likely to look at how many people they can reach with an application, and hopefully, how engaged the viewers will become with the application. Hopefully, they will consider how closely integrated the experience of the application is with the application itself.

As an example, one of my favorite areas of exploration is virtual worlds and the virtual worlds space is rife with successes and failures when advertisers step in. When the Obama campaign placed ads on billboards in various computer games, it may not have had much of an effect on the gamers racing around the racecourse and seeing an Obama sign on the side of the racetrack. It was subtle and fit into the experience nicely, but wasn’t particularly interactive, unless something special happened when you crashed into an Obama sign, which I never heard about. Yet it was very effective in generating earned media, which sometimes can be more effective than the ad itself.

Other billboards in other games and virtual worlds have been much less successful and have attracted criticism, ridicule, or even vandalism. On the other hand, successful product integration can happen when the advertisers understand the medium and fully integrate their product in the media. Colgate made smiles in Second Life. Nike sold shoes in one virtual world which actually made you run faster in the virtual world.

Yet what about the developers themselves? What do they like? Friends of mine that develop for mobile devices are not very excited about the current development environments. Getting everything just right to be listed in the iPhone app store can be a significant challenge, even for experienced embedded device developers. This becomes even more of a challenge if you are attempting to integrate your iPhone application with other applications like Facebook. Then, there is always the concern that Apple will arbitrarily and capriciously reject your application.

Friends speak much more highly of developing for Android, but they complain that it isn’t as wide a user base and they long for a development environment that will work across a wide range of mobile devices.

Personally, I’m most interested in efforts to develop a good open source handset. OpenMoko is a project to create an open, Linux based handset. There is a handset available, which appears to be a powerful development environment. Unfortunately, it does not yet include G3 support or a camera.

Over with the web-based side of application development, everyone seeks for better authentication methods. Advertisers and marketing folks want to ‘own’ the individual, and this is best done by requiring users to use an authentication method specific to the application. Yet this is a nightmare for users. They need to remember userids and passwords to many different systems. Google and Facebook are going at it with their ‘Connect’ software. You can login to many sites that I build these days using your Facebook userid and password. Being an open source developer, I like to support OpenId. It allows users to log in with a single userid to multiple systems.

For applications that need to communicate between systems, there is OAuth which allows one application to check to see if a user is properly authenticated with another system. To what extent OpenID and OAuth becomes a key part of advertising oriented applications remains to be seen, but it seems like there are real benefits in terms of sharing data.

Just as my view of what goes into a good application has changed considerably over the past forty years, I expect it will continue to change as new ideas come forward. However, some key ideas need to be kept in mind. Successful application development requires understanding what the users really want and also requires application development environments that developers enjoy working in.

(Originally posted at Digidaydaily).