Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, Bloglines, MySpace, Wikipedia, Technorati and YouTube.
That list probably accounts for a good deal of all the traffic going on as I write this but only one of them uses Adobe Flash.
Is Web 2.0 Flash averse?
It may be so, but why the Flash-phobia?
I was spurred by James Ward‘s post on the Fear of Flash. His observations on the misconceptions are spot on. Here’s a sample:
Indisputably, the power of Flash has been abused. Pop-ups, pop-overs, skip intros and annoying ads run rampant across our screens. I’ve heard it said that one should never judge a religion by its abuse. The same adage applies to technology.
I’ve posted my observations before when I compared Flash to AJAX and I did note how some sites left a bad taste in the public’s mouth.
Adobe responded to the Web 2.0 phenomenon by coming up with Apollo and the Flex-AJAX Bridge. Still, Flash adoption on Web2.0 sites remain low. Here are the factors I’m seeing:
- People realized Flash was overkill when it comes to coming up with personal sites
- Javascript took to a whole new level with AJAX
- Web Standards came about
- From a user experience standpoint, people have come to a certain expectation of how to interact with the web, therefore were turned off by websites with unconventional navigation and intereaction
That list can go on further, but I think main point is Flash been set aside because there are tools to get the job done. Perhaps we will se Flex getting more attention, but I think we need to see a killer Flex/Flash app first.
