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I also wonder if this post shows how easy it is to maintain a relatively narrow view of the web from within the world of tech blogs, in which it's all about text and rapidly produced video, not about production values or building engagement with brands. Automotive sites, sports sites (like Nike's Jumpman site, and many of the sites developed by agencies like AKQA for video games, etc. may not be your thing, but they can certainly be effective for their target audience.
Oh, and without Flash, YouTube and Flickr couldn't exist in their current forms...
I disagree, however, that there is "no better method of delivering rich visual content." And I regularly go to non-tech websites, including some of the ones you mention, and still believe that some -- if not all -- of them could do just as good a job (if not better) of building value or "engaging with the brand" or whatever you want to call it without using Flash.
I think in most cases, Flash is the equivalent of a really beautiful looking TV ad that tells you nothing whatsoever about the product -- it makes a whole team of designers happy, and it's nice to look at, but it accomplishes very little.
Well there's the essence of our disagreement. If looking beautiful wasn't important, then for better or for worse entire industries or categories of products wouldn't exist. Being nice to look at is actually hugely important and even if you don't like the term "engaging with the brand" it's something that is often best supported by animation and video. Animation and video aren't just frivolous eye candy; they help sites deliver their content and if used well keep visitors on the site.
Flash video, for example, is not the best choice by only a small margin; it's simply the only viable choice for ubiquitous video content on the web today.
Then there are other examples like using Flex on Yahoo! Finance (their interactive charts are one of the only things that keep me visiting the site, and other than Flickr it's the only Yahoo! property I still rely on).
Seriously, I'm not trying to be argumentative here -- and I completely accept the argument about *bad* Flash sites -- but I'm genuinely curious to know what you think are the alternatives to using Flash for rich content.
Flickr -- I think those are excellent, and I think they are a great
way of delivering "rich content." I have absolutely no problem with
that, nor with things like Yahoo Finance, where Flash or Flex is
performing roughly the same function as something Ajaxy would.
And I would never say that looking beautiful isn't important, because
it is -- but it's not the *most* important thing, and probably not
even one of the top 5, even if it does keep users on a site longer.
In any case, I think we probably agree more than we disagree. A well
thought-out and judicious use of Flash can be a great thing, but there
are far fewer examples of that than I might like, and far more
examples of the opposite.
The only place I would use Flash (if I were permitted to put my users first) would be for the interactive visualization of large sets of data. And even for this, SVG and JS or server-side code can now do anything Flash does, but openly.
But then, being beautiful does not even make my top ten. I am more concerned with things like interoperability with other software (ESPECIALLY for web sites) and the most efficient and accessible UIs (which are almost always ugly and almost never Flash).
This news is good for the sake of indexing content that is already out there, but it's probably a mistake for sites to think this is a green light for full flash development. At search conferences Google reps (and everybody) used to laugh at the heavy flash sites created at huge expense by big, SEO deficient advertising firms.
That said this is an important development in that it may shake up current rankings as heavy flash sites are less repressed in ranks than before.
Actually, for the linking reason you note above bloggers are SEO magicians - sometimes without even knowing it. Congratulations!
You want a girl who looks good? Or a girl that needs 1000 people to tell you she's rankable?
Flash developers just want to make somethings that looks good. We don't cry over Google ranking.
good, but no one knows it is there?
It is slightly worrying that people jumped on an announcement that basically said nothing new. The Flash Search SDK has been around for a couple of years now and Google implemented it some time ago so this big announcement is actually hyping up a pretty lowly modification, since flash still carries no semantic meta data of any sort it still will suffer all the problems it currently has when it comes to ranking.
Google has indexed SWFs for well over a year, this announcement means Google now has even more content to deal with and yet provides no real mechanism to help either Google or Developers with tools to assist actual ranking.
Yes Flash can be used for good and not evil and I have seen both.
But I ask you this have you ever written an article that you didn't think it didn't deserve the coverage, but you had to anyways?
Have you ever had to convince a client that Flash wasn't they way to go but yet the client was so inspired by magic of flash that they didn't want anything else.
Have you ever played or had your children ask you to play a game on the Internet. Oh that needs flash?
The new Wall-E site. . . . Ya. . . Flash. . . . My 2.5 year old nephew can navigate that site.
And on a journalist point. I hate sensation headlines that get my nickers in the knot. You can get my attention in a more subtle way, you work for the globe you can write an intelligent headline. And that is what I look for from your personal blog too. Intelligent Technology news, whether I agree or disagree with your article is up for debate. But if I wanted Technology News written with Sun styled headlines I know where to find them.
lots of situations in which Flash makes sense -- and that there are
also lots of situations where clients want it and you have to do it.
That doesn't change my central point, however.
As for the headline, there's a fine line between a "sensational"
headline and one that gets your attention -- a line that is so fine in
some cases that it's difficult to see at all. I couldn't help but
notice, for example, that you enjoyed the headline on my Rogers iPhone
post, and that one was arguably just as sensational :-)
In regards to the headline. At least the Rogers one ended up being true! But I am glad to see you started quite the debate on this post. Sometimes it takes a headline like that to get the masses involved, but I even if flash did suck I still didn't like the headline.
Oh Mathew. You are so old school. Clearly you've spent too much time cavorting with your engineering and uber geek friends. When done brilliantly and for the right reasons, Flash rocks.
I totally agree with your statement about Flash -- it does rock, when
done brilliantly and for the right reasons. Unfortunately, there's a
whole lot of Flash out there that doesn't fit either part of that
description.
I have worked on probably 50-100 Flash sites (as back-end dude) and maybe 1 was worth doing. The rest were at the insistence of the dopey money-to-burn client.
I will say that some of the Flex stuff can be interesting. Generating charts/graphs is much best handled via Flex. Mulit-file upload works better with Flex. There are some possibilities here. So maybe it won't suck forever.
RT @tweetmeme News flash: Flash websites still suck [link to post]
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