Flash has been used for many years, mainly in online advertising, then in online games and most recently in online video sites.
I personally think Flash made its big real debut when the big players realized that ~99% of consumers had a powerful video decoder built right into their browser, yes, Flash FLV.
Macromedia missed out big-time on monetizing FLV, which was one of the technological forces behind Youtube’s $1.5Bn. Macromedia sells Flash-Media-Servers, but nobody uses these as the Flash clients can also play FLVs ‘streamed’ over standard HTTP connections, funny.
In any case, this is no Flash-101, this is me telling you that i’m feeling something new in the ‘hood. Like I said, Flash was used for banners/games/videos, always there to provide some sort of applicative feature.
Recently, meaning in the past month or so, I’ve been noticing a whole different level of Flash adoption by major sites. It started with Google who used Flash for their street-view.
Google are the holly-grail, torch-carrying hero when it comes to utilizing DHTML and avoiding Flash (another fine examples is Yahoo’s Pipes [thanks kevin cheng for the input]). Google needed raw processing power on the client to stitch together these panoramic images, Flash was the only option, and they went with it, kudos. This is still an applicative use though.
Then, in a matter of weeks, Youtube and Amazon both introduce Flash as a core component of their main pages. I’d think Amazon were copying it off Youtube, but i’ll give them the credit.
what’s next ?
well, I guess a whole bunch of sites are going to copy the clean, apple’ish, glassy, reflective sort of item panel that Youtube and Amazon are using. The field is open, developers can do endless things with Flash, and when large sites start using this sort of content on their main pages, we (the users) are sure to have a sleeker experience.
It’s important to mention how Flash content is not indexed by search-engines, although that should be easily fixed using something that provides alternate text for embeds (anything like that being used ?).
You forgot that it’s easy to embed:
http://www.laudontech.com
http://streetviewgallery.corank.com
great links, thanks
Check out this search:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=search+.swf&btnG=Google+Search
One of the items in the results should have a “[flash]” text near it.
This means that Google did Index some of the flash and did manage to extract some of the text appearing in that flash.
There is very limited support for flash indexing, but it does exist.