Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/29/google-will-no-longer-index-ad.html
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Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.
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Google unsends shockwave across the Internet!
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A thing that was pretty cool for a second, and could have continued in a wonderful direction of enabling connections and creativity, but instead went down the path of being a buggy, insecure, data-pirate ship trying to establish a walled-garden monopoly on the open web. Coincidence that its logo is vanishingly similar to Facebook’s?
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Thus is the fate of any product acquired by Adobe.
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I do miss the early Flash days, one of the issues was that it was used for everything and even for the things that it had some use for people leaned into it way too hard to the point of becoming a cliche/joke.
But its use in Flash based games and animation is what i miss most about that time period. I’m sure just as many small games/animations are being made now, but there’s something about those early days that made it all so accessible and exciting
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Great job, Adobe!
Before I read the headline closely, I briefly thought they were deindexing facebook. One can dream.
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GIFs outlasted them.
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i still feel like the things that were wrong with flash were less than the things that were great about it… and that they could have (should have) been addressed. it’s a shame. it was a great tool for visually oriented creative types to truly get out there and make something new and different online. now it’s all code. and everything looks like a news magazine…
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But, badgers!
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There’s plenty of existing software that simplifies things to be less technical, the problem i see is that there’s so many choices now that weeding through it all is a chore. Finding that one piece of software that fits your exact needs requires either luck or a lot of effort, which is something i’m currently running into as far as finding a good replacement for Photoshop because i’ve tried a number of alternatives and i’m not super happy with any of them. Back then Shockwave/Flash was one of a few choices available and it happened to be great.
Weirdly, for a while, all architecture and design websites were flash blobs. I asked an architect why, and he said he had no idea either but he was really sorry.
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When i was going to college a lot of business sites were doing flash because they thought it looked the best and i just… i hated it so much. At the same time it was a good quick way to see who was out of touch or was trying too hard.
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Frequently something like that happens because one of the early “good enough” whatever were done in a particular style/material/technology and other companies in that industry point to that one and tell a consultant “I like that! Make us one like that!”, and if enough happen like that early on, that is the best example anyone else has as well.
On the other side of that equation, people learn to use that technology/style/material and when a client expresses no real preference they “just do another one”, or at least point to some existing ones done that way and say “how about one like that?”
Sometimes that second part is stronger than you think because some company does a thing for someone in some industry, and then they seek out other companies in that industry and say “we did this over here for them, do you want one like that?”
Go look at RV Park websites, they all look pretty cookie cutter to me (they aren’t all flash, but they were clearly all from the same template, or multiple companies making a template to look like some other RV site they found). You can see that pattern elsewhere too.
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Obligs:
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probably because it was much easier to enforce a visual layout with Macromedia’s tools. Sometimes the more standardized tools aren’t up to the job.
When I worked at a web design / branding firm in the early-2000s, the office was firmly split into two camps: the designers who saw Flash as THE FUTURE and wanted to pitch us as an all-Flash company, and designers who wanted to use it for games & animation but not full sites. Eventually the “it’s the future!” people won and the old fogeys like me were pushed out. I guess it’s a bit late for schadenfreude but… I told you so!
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Bet it felt good to be finall proven right after eight years. HTML5 to the rescue! (and maybe some SVG too?)
Well, more like thirteen, but still.
At one point (around 2004), the company I worked for sent me to FlashForward (the official Flash conference) to report back on the future of Flash; I went to sessions held by developers from both Macromedia and Adobe, and those guys made it super clear that Flash was a terrible replacement for HTML/CSS/etc and was not meant to build content-heavy sites in, that it wasn’t made to be secure, that it was designed for animation and video. So I went back and told everyone at the company, hey, the devs themselves say not to build sites totally in Flash, we should probably not do that for like, Procter & Gamble. And everyone laughed and did it anyway. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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