As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only site is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.
This announcement has been a long time coming, as Flash developers have been wishing for ways to make their content searchable for close to a decade. Adobe acknowledges this in its announcement, saying that although search engines are able to index static text and links within Flash SWF files, “[Rich Internet Applications] and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states—a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.”
This announcement may also result in some major usability changes (for the better) for Flash on the web. In a post to its Webmaster Central Blog, Google wrote that it can now index all kinds of textual content in SWF files, like that included in Flash gadgets, buttons, menus, entirely self-contained Flash web sites, “and everything in between.” Google can now also follow URLs embedded within Flash files to add to the crawling pipeline. This new indexing technology does not, however, include FLV files (video files that are found on sites like YouTube) because those are generated as videos and don’t contain any text elements like an SWF file does.
Google says it’s able to do this by developing an algorithm that “explores Flash files in the same way that a person would,” by clicking buttons and manually going through Flash content. “Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed,” wrote the company. “We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.”
Of course, Google (and eventually Yahoo) won’t be able to index everything embedded within a Flash file—at least not yet. Anything that is image-related, including text that is embedded into images, will be invisible to the search engines for the time being. Google also noted that it can’t execute certain JavaScripts that may be embedded into a Flash file, and that while it indexes content that is contained in a separate HTML or XML file, it won’t be counted as part of the content in the Flash file. These are all issues that are being worked on, however, and are likely to change in the future.
Yahoo is also working with Adobe to index SWF files, but doesn’t appear to be as far along as Google just yet. One player that is noticeably missing is Microsoft, though. From Adobe’s announcement and the language used by Google, it appears as if each search engine has to work with Adobe to make this possible—meaning that Microsoft has either been excluded by Adobe for this round or has decided to voluntarily sit this one out. Either way, with searchable SWF files down, usability experts can now focus all of their attention on other Flash-related concerns, like blatant design perversion and excessive animation abuse.
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Flash memory maker SanDisk Corp. on Monday will debut an online video service and a USB flash drive that can carry television programs and videos from a computer for playback on TVs.
The Sansa TakeTV video player — an ensemble of an oversized USB drive, remote control and a small dock that connects to a TV — and its accompanying video service, Fanfare, marks the latest attempt by a company looking to bridge content between the PC and the television.
Similar to using a USB drive to store and move data files, users of TakeTV can drag-and-drop video files stored on their computer — Fanfare downloads, home videos or other unrestricted video content from the Web — onto the device. Users can then plug it into the cradle connected to a TV. A simple menu appears on the TV to scroll through the files for playback.
The TakeTV player is $99.99 for a 4 gigabyte model and $149.99 for an 8 GB one that can hold up to 10 hours of video. Fanfare, in a test stage, offers premium TV shows for $1.99 per download — roughly the same price as rival services, but SanDisk says it hopes to ultimately provide a broad mixture of free and ad-supported content as well as pay-per-download videos.
Fanfare’s catalog at launch is small, with about 85 titles. It features TV shows from CBS, including “CSI” and “Survivor,” Showtime, TV Guide, and Smithsonian Networks. Dozens of titles are being added each week, SanDisk said.
The online video service is a new venture for Milpitas-based SanDisk, which is the leading maker of flash memory cards and holds a distant but steady second-place position behind Apple Inc. in the portable media player market with a 10 percent share in the U.S., according to market researcher IDC.
SanDisk saw an opportunity in the fledgling market it didn’t want to pass up, said Kate Purmal, senior vice president and general manager of SanDisk’s digital content unit.
The distribution of videos, movies and television shows over the Internet is expected to grow as companies ranging from Apple and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to the TV networks themselves compete for the audience. The various methods of getting the video from over the Internet onto the TV, however, has yet to become easy or cheap enough for the mainstream market.
CBS Corp., one of SanDisk’s first major partners, found in its consumer research of the TakeTV product that people liked its simplicity, compact size, and price, said David Poltrack, president of CBS Vision.
SanDisk will need to build a larger video catalog to succeed, said Danielle Levitas, analyst at IDC.
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Adobe Systems Inc released new software for its popular Flash Player on Sunday that promises to bring the quality of live video on cellular phones closer to that of video on computers.
Adobe, whose software made possible the rapid rise of pioneering online video site YouTube, said Nokia and NTT DoCoMo Inc would use its new Flash Lite 3 in their new cell phones.
Adobe said more than 300 million mobile devices equipped with previous versions of Flash had already been shipped and it expected more than a billion Flash-enabled devices to be available by 2010.
Adobe’s Flash software is installed on about 98 percent of all personal computers and is used by virtually all popular online video sites, mainly thanks to the fact it works independently of the device that the video is displayed upon.
Gary Kovacs, in charge of marketing at Adobe’s mobile unit, called Flash Lite 3 “the most significant advance we’ve made in mobile” and said it brought Adobe closer to being able to release software versions for mobile and desktop simultaneously.
“It’s probably a few years away. We’ll do it over the next couple to three years,” he told Reuters.
Nokia’s 3.4 million-strong mobile software development group, Forum Nokia, said it would launch a new development community on Monday to help Flash developers and designers.
Nokia, the world’s biggest mobile telephone maker, announced a major new push into multimedia, including video, music and gaming last month, seeking to challenge Apple Inc’s dominance in portable entertainment.
The head of Forum Nokia, Lee Epting, said in a statement: “Flash Lite 3 will enable us to deliver richer content to our customers, such as videos and animated ringtones.”
Adobe, also known for its Acrobat document management and Photoshop software, said earlier this month that its profit more than doubled last quarter on strong sales of new products and as it makes inroads into mobile, video and office worker markets.
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