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Flash and Web 2.0

There’s been a lot of material put out on the web design blogs about the new buzz word on the block - ‘Web 2.0’, but there is no mention of Flash. What exactly is the relationship between Flash and Web 2.0?

The term 'Web 2.0' was originally coined as a buzzword to mean ‘the new web’, but it already has a (rather long) technical entry on Wikipedia.

Web 2.0’s building blocks include Ajax, Ruby, and a whole slew of social buzzwords.

There’s a lot of definitions of Web 2.0, but here’s two that I prefer:

Version A: ‘Hey, the web works now!
At worst, a self fulfilling prophecy: anything that is new and seems to work is ‘Web 2.0’, even if its been around for the last 10 years, has finally matured, everyone knows it by its original name... and is using it already. At best, Web 2.0 is simply a means of telling the general public that web content is now meeting many of expectations heaped upon it during the dot com boom.

Version B: Using the web ‘as an application platform and social network'
Web 1.0 was the ‘Information superhighway', but web 2.0 builds on this basic infrastructure, and it includes applications where

• Shared rather private data is used (e.g. syndication, WSDL)
• Site content is more important than appearance (data driven rather than UI heavy designs, e.g. blogs)
• Where development of the application itself is usually a public affair (open beta, open source languages and applications).

Like most people I’m a little confused as to what this actually means in practice. Ajax seems to mean ‘hey, browsers now support JavaScript and CSS!', and most of the Web 2.0 buzzwords are simply a way to get interest back to the web (and of course, to separate venture capitalists from their money as easily as we used to) rather than a meaningful description.

There’s one thing that Web 2.0 seems to include that is missed by a lot of people: Web 2.0 sites are properly tested against users, and that’s why they seem to work well and become popular. These sites are not 'Web 2.0', but they are something much more important - 'successful through actually fulfilling a need, good design, and appropriate choice of technologies'. Wow. There's a shock.

Web 2.0 includes certain types of sites (Google maps, Flikr, blogs etc) not because they use Ruby or whatever, but because users like these sites, and the sites therefore get lots of hits.

There are of course drawbacks to this strategy. For one thing, Web 2.0 sites are less accessible than Web 1.0 sites (because Ajax is not usually accessible), but this would not show up in testing (the vast majority of users don’t mind, so the low number of access impaired users would get drowned out in the hits graph). For another thing, Web 2.0 is aimed at traditional desktop machines, and doesn’t do well on mobile devices. Nontheless, it appears that the fundamental factor behind Web 2.0 is that users like the end result.

What does this mean for Flash?
Flash is not cited as a Web 2.0 technology, mainly because users see it most in intrusive advertising, plus the - often unmentioned - tendancy for Flash designers to design for other Flash designers rather than the end user (and of course, let us not forget clients who specify sites where 'they want a site that is as bandwidth heavy, as web-arty as our competitor's site, but even more so).

Users don’t like Flash as much as they used to. That’s not a problem with Flash. It is because most Flash site designs are not tested against their target audience, and flashy graphics are not as new and different as they were back in 2000. We can no longer get away with it because users now realize that 'Designer web art' means 'fundamentally unusable but looks nice for 30 seconds'.

That is a shame because Flash has all the capabilities that Web 2.0 has, plus Flash can include accessibility (oh yes it can!), and it runs on mobile devices.

I currently work in the education field, and all our (Flash based) applications are tested against a target audience. The funny thing is, the end results look a lot like Web 2.0 applications -

• They use websevices and other data centric technologies
• They separate data from the user interface (we design 'engines' that handle the exam data).
• Their design incorporates in-house unit testing (via people who are not the content creators)
• Their design includes the user in the production process through field testing

Thus, based on this experience, I have a third definition for Web 2.0, and this one actually includes Flash designers:

Version C: Putting the user first
Not the designer. Not the browser. Not the venture capitalist, but the user. In achieving this, use whatever technology fits, and make damn sure that you are fulfilling a need, and that the end user can actually use your designs.

Um. Or maybe I'm just describing Web 3.0.

Added 28 Nov 2005
Interestingly, it appears that Web 2.0 technologies are already making the same mistakes that Flash folks already know and love. Maybe that bit at the end about Web 3.0 wasnt the throw-away joke I assumed when I wrote it!

Added 2 Dec 2005
I've had a few emails of the 'put up or shut up kind' over this post, centered around the question 'Well, show me an application that is better than Google maps and that uses Flash as its front end'.

Easy.

How often would you use Google maps seriously? Five times a year? Yeah. me too.

I use this every day, and it gets better the more I use it. My own radio station. I get to filter the play list, and I can let others listen ot it too.

Best of all, it also describes my musical taste: I like music that features a subtle use of harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, repetitive melodic phrasing, extensive vamping and mixed major key tonality. I don't really know about that, but what I do know is that after a few days, it started playing music that I had never heard of, but that felt like it was part of my record collection!

NB - You have to be in America to listen to it (i.e. you have to know a US zip code... but all I did was think back to a certain TV show).

Added 2 Dec 2005
Last.fm is cool to.

Posted by motiongraphics at 01:53 PM | Comments (5)

Foundation Flash 8 at a store near you

Foundation Flash is now available at Amazon.

Just had a quick peek over at Amazon, and I noticed that my first Flash 8 book, Foundation Flash 8 is available here.

... and no, I don't have any copies yet, so I can't say how good it is ;)

Posted by motiongraphics at 07:16 PM | Comments (1)