Looking couple of years back, we saw the rapid domination of facebook and twitter in content distribution. The game was all about getting your “page” based content linked and shared out within the content ecosystem.  Link backs and RSS were king. People where using tweet deck as the broadcast mechanism for their articles, blogs, announcements.  This is still goes on, but I believe we are seeing rapid shift in consumption.  People are not just consuming content via browsers like Chrome, Safari, IE, and Firefox.  They are using connected and disconnected apps on ipads, androids,  connected TVs, sms, game consoles, kiosks, car dashboards, personal devices, watches, etc.

However, this rapid and disruptive shift is causing pain in the CMS community.  CMS providers and their customers spent millions automating, managing, tracking, and publishing “web pages and sites.”   For example, large and powerful CMS providers are struggling to adapt their page + template based products with more flexible publishing systems.  For example, many CMS providers are establishing alliances and partnerships with adaptive/screen scrapping technologies like Usablenet and Netbiscuits.   These technologies focus more on the quick and dirty approach of adapting a website to other devices, while not changing the underlining CMS technology.  This approach works from a pure reach perspective, this mean it will allow these CMS solutions to publish to a vast array of devices, but usually sacrifices  the user experience and perceived speed.   Adaptive technologies are very hard to implement when constructing a very native / dynamic / and-or immersive experiences.  For example, if I want to manage content used within an native iOS, Android, and-or Vizio TV application, it will be very hard or next to impossible to use these solutions.  Its less about the page, more about the content API.  More and more developers are demanding content publishing systems that expose assests via REST Json/XML APIs.  This enables pure content distribution across more devices and channels. It is my opinion, the era of the “CMS template” is becoming less relevant in regards to overall CMS need.  I want my content to be semantic, agile, and portable.  This way I can truly use and publish it anywhere.  Therefore, its less about bake vs. fry, its now about an API.