Coolskool : Kola Oyedeji's Cool Technology Blog

When exactly did Flash become sexy?

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posted Sunday, 20 May 2007

In an image re-invention that would give Madonna a run for her money - in a short space of time Flash has done well to reinvent itself from being the 'skip intro' technology to one of the stars of (I hate saying it) web 2.0. Chris Adamson touched on this in his latest onjava post:

“But think about this: when did Flash become ubiquitous, and when did we all stop hating it? Just two years ago, Flash was largely known for being the technology behind all the goddamned annoying interactive banner ads: Club the baby panda and win a PlayStation 3!!! There were good uses of the technology of course, but it certainly feels more respectable today than it did then. And that’s funny, if you think about it, because the rise of Flash’s acceptance as a rich client-side technology runs concurrent with the rise of Ajax — if Flash was loathed then, and faced a challenge from the hip and trendy Ajax, then what made it succeed?”

 

Was it the rise of Ajax? Or perhaps YouTube? I have my own take on this Flash became sexy when Flex became affordable! Thats not to say people were not doing cool things with Flash and Flex before then. But putting the tools into everybody's hands (for less than 20K) put consultants, digital agencies, developers, designers and many others in a position to finally be able to change people's perception of this technology.

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comments (5)


1. Paulius Uza left...
Sunday, 20 May 2007 12:47 pm :: http://www.uza.lt

To me, Flash always was. Think www.thefwa.com and not banner ads.


2. Phineas left...
Sunday, 20 May 2007 6:28 pm

I agree actually... "flash" and "sexy" have been used interchangeably since around 1998

( Go Naija! ;-) )


3. Kola Oyedeji left...
Sunday, 20 May 2007 7:06 pm

I agree with you guys - I've always considered the potential of Flash for applications - more so when Flash professional came out.


4. John Dowdell left...
Sunday, 20 May 2007 8:45 pm :: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd

It becomes more attractive to people as they themselves can use it.

Watching popular video made lots of people say "hey i can do that", and there weren't really alternative methods. As a result, lots of people finally accepted Flash.

But it's like the ability to refresh text in a browser without reloading the whole page... was available in MSIE for years, but it wasn't until it got into web-influentials' choice of browsers that we started hearing all this "ajax" talk. People respond to it, when they themselves can easily use it.

I'd say "People would rather Flash than be Flashed", except that sounds funny. But does that sense-of-ownership idea sound good to you...?

jd/adobe


5. cosmin left...
Monday, 21 May 2007 11:59 am :: http://cosmincimpoi.blogspot.com/

I don't think that it has anything to do with Flex. Flash got sexy exactly when the developers community matured and gained the knowledge that allowed on average way more cool, useful and friendly web experiences. DHTML on the other hand got cool when they rebranded it to AJAX. Flash was once 99% bad but we made it better. DHTML died and was reborn. Either way it was the users acceptance that made it a viable platform. Flex is just a tool that will hopefully make large RIAs even better by integrating more stuff that ppl are used to and so they'll continue to accept it in their browsers. But Flex is not everything when it comes to cool as in "cool experiences". It'll take some more time and effort definitely.