Adobe’s Flash Lite: Vibrant, Compelling, New Paridigm and other buzz words
Ignore my sarcastic view of the PR sweet-spot words in this otherwise notable press release from Adobe. Flash has made a big comeback with it’s popularity driven by applications in YouTube and other media aggregation sites.
Some of you may say - “Comeback - have you been under a rock or something? Hasn’t Adobe’s Flash been a critical element of web design, rich media ads, etc for years?” and to some degree, rightly so. Here’s the reason for my choice of words “Comeback”: Flash grew popular in the late 90’s and early 00’s for visually stunning mulitimedia websites. Then came search engine optimization and search engine marketing best practices, which looked down upon the use of Flash in websites, as search engine spiders could not “read” a Flash file. So, it’s been out of vogue if you wanted your website to be search engine friendly.
With the advent of YouTube and other media aggregation sites, Flash has become the new poster child for media distribution capabilities. Now that it has an even newer lease on life on cellphone platforms, it may be here to stay.
So, strategic question - will the use of Flash media files take the place of MP3, MP4, due to the ubiquity of the Flash Player? Of course, you technology strategy geniuses out there are saying “Ed - I had that figured out 2 years ago - what took you so long?”.
This would have just a LITTLE impact on the current technology that drives music, film, podcasting and iPods, etc. If cellphone MFRs implement Flash as their media technology of choice, the ramifications are pretty large…..I’ve already said that cellphones replace the iPod and other MPx players in the end game. Maybe this accelerates the end game.