Why not an all Flash site?
I received an email today from a member of the FITC Community asking about our choice of Ning as the platform over something that was Flash based. Here's the email I received:
Question: The choice of Ning for a Flash based community seems kinda bass-acwards to me. It's maybe the best of the 2.0 Social web XHTML technology and it's an immense resource for the group but it's not a Flash site at all?I suspect the choice was made because of the lack of any other Flash based option with these features BUT I am really curious about your thoughts and I would deeply respect and appreciate any insight you could give me on providing an alternative to Ning within a Flash ecosystem worthy of FITC.The choice of Ning really had nothing to do with whether it used Flash or not. Our own site that we just relaunched before FITC Toronto only has a minimal amount of Flash on it and makes use of other technologies like AJAX and jQuery as well. We've had this debate with our user group over the years, whether a Flash user group should have a Flash based site. The reality is that after much experimentation, doing things like blogs and forums in Flash simply doesn't make sense. The text based model of html and css is much more suited to these sorts of applications.
At the end of the day, Ning provides a very full suite of tools for building a community site and with their update to allow us to add applications to the group pages rather than just the user pages we can now build our own Flash widgets to use on the site if we find the need. Honestly, I think even if a Flash option did exist we wouldn't choose it. It would have to REALLY take into consideration accessibility and searchability issues, make sure each and every view could be deep-linked, etc.
Not only do I not think Flash is right tool for this sort of task, but FITC has come to be about so much more than Flash that we really feel no need to force it down people's throats. Yes we focus on Flash, but we also try and give people the big picture of what's going on around them. We even had a Silverlight session when it first came out :)
Use the right tool for the job at hand.
Comments
Posted by: Mike Britton | May 20, 2009 9:41 PM