Flowgram Delivers the Talking Web
Flowgram is so unique that it’s difficult to describe what it does in a simple sentence. The best way to describe Flowgram is to think of it as a hybrid of online screencasting and presentation. Think JingProject meets Google Presentation or Camstasia meets Powerpoint, but there’s much more to it than that.
Microsoft Binder 2.0?
Another way to describe Flowgram is that it’s like the Web 2.0 reincarnation of Microsoft Office’s Binder. For those too young to remember, Binder was a handy little utility that came with Microsoft Office 1995 and 1997. It let Office users store Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents in one package. It was an excellent tool for keeping every document related to a project together in one place. For some unknown reason Microsoft killed it with the release of Office 2000.
Fast forward to today with Flowgram, which does a similar thing but with multimedia files and Web content. Now you can package many different types of content and share them with others who can view the presentation without having to download or install anything. The presentation can include items such as PowerPoint presentations, photo’s, Web pages, RSS feeds, audio files and Text. To top off this multimedia presentation you can record an audio narration to explain everything that’s displayed on the screen. This would be an excellent way to create training material or demos for products or services.
How to Improve Circulation
No matter how good something is, there’s always room for improvement. Flowgram can make things better by supporting more than just the PowerPoint format when it comes to presentations. There are many other popular formats they need to embrace. Still, the workaround is for those presentations to be saved or converted to the ubiquitous PowerPoint format.
The other aspect that could use some enhancement is performance and speed. It took a great deal of time to create a test flowgram with ten photos of relatively high quality and one mp3 file. One could only imagine how much time it would take if a flowgram contained more content than that, especially the ever bloated PowerPoint presentation.
Another element that seems missing from all this is support for video. It would be the final touch if you could include video from YouTube or elsewhere or upload your own. That would start to tread into Animoto territory, but that’s all right in my book. Still, considering the complaint about speed and performance, adding videos at this point wouldn’t help matters much, huh? Perhaps they are planning to add video support once they improve the performance issues.
Conclusion
Providing a narrated multimedia online presentation that doesn’t require the viewer to download or install anything is an extremely attractive and exciting new concept. Flowgram does this well and one can only expect things to get better with time.
Here’s a screencast that shows Flowgram in action:
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