The Challenge

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Where Flash fails for Social Media

Published by Esteban Glas on August 24th, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Social Media, Web, Web 2.0, Web Marketing

Back in 1974 when the guys at Xerox came up with the concept or in 1984 when the developers at Mac mapped the action to Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V they couldn’t of possibly imagined the consequences copy and paste would have on the world.

In today’s “blog it-digg it-add it to del.icio.us” world copy and paste make the web move on. Yet Flash fails, because it natively blocks selection of texts and images (it is not technically impossible to allow it, but most developers and designers fail to take this into account). This prevents -to some extent- the natural viral nature of many webpages and sitelets.

Another undesired side effect is the difficulty to make  purely flash sites search engine-friendly. A great deal hany use as been written about this particular issue, with some partial solutions for this, and both Google and Yahoo’s bots have been reported to be able to crawl for text within .swf files. Yet ther’s no way Flash can be as SE-optimized as HTML, xHTML and the like.

Thus if I was ever involved in social media -ahem- I’d stick to HTML as much as possible leaving flash (and images) to just those things that can’t be achieved otherwise. All text should be HTML, and flash is only of any benefit if it is used for breath taking visual content.

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