Acrobat Labs: Presentations

Yesterday Adobe released Acrobat.com Presentations and I was alerted to it through a post by Ryan Stewart, Adobe evangelist and energetic geek who knows how to position it.

There is a lot of competition in this space from delivery vehicles like Slideshare to what I believe is a better implementation of online presentation creation than what Adobe is offering in this beta release, 280Slides.

The issue I have with all of the offerings on Acrobat.com is this: I want to use the functionality (especially embedding) but I do NOT want Adobe’s branding all over the container I embed on my site(s), blogs, etc.

As the economy tanked and free, branded offerings morphed in to paid, put-your-brand-on-it ones, these deliverables finally got to the point where they should’ve been all along. I want generic looking containers and just about everyone else I know does too. 280Slides understands this and you can see their non-branded container below.

The other thing I find intriguing is how much effort is put behind online slideshows and how a bunch of slides doesn’t tell the story anymore. When more people are adhering to the PresentationZen philosophy of not packing slides with tons of bullet points, without the presenter telling the story, these embedded slideshows have minimal value.