webponce rants

More stuff from The Vacationeers

Flicking through a copy of .net magazine this weekend at a service station on the M4 revealed my smiling face peering back at me. For a minute, I couldn’t help thinking I was having an out of body experience; perhaps some Harry Potteresque moment where my soul had been captured in print, never to escape; maybe some fiendish teenager had put mirrors in all the periodicals to frustrate and annoy eager readers; or just my short article had been printed this issue. I purchased a copy in any case to do further tests. I hope for my own sake that my spiritual being is not trapped in ink and paper form.

Adobe have announced today their partnership with Google and Yahoo in order to advance their ability to index flash websites. Everyone seems rather excited by the prospect, but I’m less so. Why? Well, I think its potentially a bad thing for people in my industry.

“If our flash is indexable, why create an HTML alternative?”

I can’t help thinking this question is going to be asked, and decisions based upon this will be made. Building an HTML alternative is not only for SEO, it is primarily for the sake of accessibility, and users who don’t have, or choose to have Flash installed. Many people often used SEO as the reason to create an accessible site. I never mind this approach, as at least we can build the HTML alternative. There are approaches to building flash using screen-reader technology, but nothing does the trick like some good ol’ semantic HTML in this case.

Not to mention, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Clients will read this tidbit of information from Google, and expect their flash site to suddenly appear at the top of Google. Wrong again - most enterprise or substantial sites are not built using static SWF files, but utilise on-demand loading of assets and database calls. These sites will not magically appear in Google’s index.

I’ve yet to see how this integration works, but what about precedence, level of importance and semantic data? Those who will automagically appear in the listings are those developers who built their content in static SWF - and are less likely to have marked up the content in any sensible format.

Who gains from this the most? I think Google, in being able to inspect the content of flash sites, rather than users who are looking for content rich flash sites, are the main beneficiary. I hope I’m pleasantly proved wrong.

I’ve mentioned on this blog before about barriers to entry for innovations like opensocial or openid - and how some things are just too technical to become interesting to the mainstream. here is something which is lowering that barrier - and possibly (until tonight) the most anticipated 404 page i’ve ever bookmarked - http://www.google.com/friendconnect.

FriendConnect promises to offer social tools through basic embeds and snippets of codes, allowing content developers who aren’t necessarily the most technically savvy, to still enable their site with the power of social networking.

David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google, explains “Many sites aren’t explicitly social and don’t necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there’s an emerging wave of social standards — OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making ‘any app, any site, any friends’ a reality.”

Watch this, and many other spaces.

Occasionally I remember how much of a geek i am, and worry myself. This is one of those times, normal people don’t/shouldn’t get so excited about web analytics tools. However, i’m not normal, so http://piwik.org/ has made me sit up and say ‘oooh’. I’ve long wished i could do something more with the data *inside* google analytics, and piwik seems to solve that problem, not to mention using open source and non-prop software. I’d worry a little about constant hits to a db, and its scalability (as i’ve seen with slim’s implementation of mint) - but its certainly worth a punt on a smaller site, and the API is worth looking at. Watch this tiny space.