Flash flood
Macromedia's Flash started off as a good idea. Having a graphics-rich, programming language was an incredible boon to early web programmers; the strength of its platform interoperability offsetting the proprietary nature of the product.
In the early bad-boy days of the Commercial Internet, Flash was used to push the edge of html. You could do things with Flash; animation that dazzled like disco sequins, operating system agnostic graphics and interactive marketing tools as entertaining as a clown.
It's evolved since then and I mean that in an Intelligent-Design-Sarcastic-kind of way.
First it was the goofs; the emailed animations like a blender full of dancing hamsters or a bigmouth singing bass.
Then it was the drawn-out Flash intros on web sites subjecting the browser to endless "loading" warnings to show an expensive not-so-clever animation that palled quickly after the first viewing.
Now, Flash has found its true niche. It's the whore of Madison Avenue. The most annoying popups on websites are built with Flash. Plus the newest abomination; the full-page Flash ads run on credible web sites like the Washington Post. Sure they say "skip this ad" now. How long will that last, I wonder.
Lastly, take a good look at what Flash can do from a privacy perspective sometime. Right-click on a Flash ad and bring up the settings menu. There's settings that say things like "Allow washingtonpost.com to access your camera and microphone?" It defaults now to Deny, but the implication is clear--someday it might default to allow.
Why would anyone in their right mind ever click "allow"? What does it say about the future of Flash ads that this option is even in there?
By the way, if you're using Firefox, there's an excellent free product called Flashblock that will disable them.
Posted on November 28, 2005
