Comments on: Let me brand my cloud. Part II

By: Henrik Ahlen

Henrik Ahlen — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:56:43 +0000

Great book, I am recommending it in my networks along with another small gem from 37 Signals, Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a succeessful web application: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/

The whole concpet of print-on-demand books that also can be sold as PDFs are appealing, feels like the future of nisched publishing.

By: Mark Zelis

Mark Zelis — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:36:37 +0000

This is a thought I’ve had but not challenged to change. Thank you for writing about this. My solution as been to steer clients away from co-Branded apps (facebook - Twitter - Wordpress) in favor of less broad-reaching custom solutions. I worked for some time at Leo Burnett and was taught the power of brand. It is no good for my clients to shuttle their visitors off to facebook. My feeling is piggy-backing on other brands defuses your brand’s impact and creates more work as you maintain 2 web presences.

My impression is that it would be difficult to convince providers of free apps that they should adapt an open standard. A good option may be to offer Branded versions as a free standard and Open-Brand versions for a fee.

By: Jon Moss

Jon Moss — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 21:21:52 +0000

Just getting round to catching on the old feeds, and loved reading this :-)

Totally agree with the Open Band concept, and also agree about the loss of brand when using Web Apps.

Basecamp does allow some customisation and you can add your logo + the client’s. This is a working solution, but not ideal.

Too be honest, some of the clients wouldn’t notice ;-)

By: Rolf Häsänen

Rolf Häsänen — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 15:52:54 +0000

Really great Idea - I would love it even more when extended to lo tek stuff too so that one could just give print shops and what ever the OpenBrand URL and presto it became a discussion about content (since branding information has been taken care of).

By: Andreas Carlsson

Andreas Carlsson — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 11:07:41 +0000

Hi Eddie!
Glad you like the OpenBrand idea. There is no mailing list but any news for the project will be posted here on Noded.biz so if you keep your eye open or subscribe to out post feed you won’t miss a thing!
Take care! /Andreas

By: eddeaux

eddeaux — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 17:02:44 +0000

Sounds like a great idea. I haven’t looked yet, but is there a mailing list to get updates on the project? Best of Luck!

By: Andreas Carlsson

Andreas Carlsson — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 07:41:40 +0000

Collecting them would be a great idea :-) Just one entry point would be lovely.

Your thoughts on the way to get the branding-API going is really good. My idea was to approach to web-people that has a lot of influence right to get the project going. But your idea of making the pilot framework and then create a service using the framework/API to get the smaller app providers onto the waggon is much better. It makes the whole idea/project more tangible.

Bloggy.se is supporting custom CSS files, that is really good but it is still lacking the unique place/url/identifier that contains the branding information.

Let’s get in touch and see if this is anything we can make a reality :-)

By: Wezz

Wezz — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 09:13:02 +0000

This was a great post. I have had similar thoughts about this but they extend even further.
My dream is to have the possibility to gather all the different application I frequently use in an web / air application with the same branding throughout each service.

But to get back to your subject:
I believe this would be possible through a consortium of different web application providers getting together and working out a API for web design.
The biggest technical challenge is to agree on a very generic but still versatile CSS framework to work with.

So it would most likely be smaller applications that would be among the early adopters.
One first step would be to create a pilot framework then create a twitter service and some other application using this framework/API.

Get back to me about what you think