Most Influential Flash Site Of The Decade
For the 10th anniversary of formerly Macromedia Flash, Adobe have been involved in many interesting celebrations/initiatives (being very close to Flash I’m delighted to see Adobe taking so much care of it). In conjunction with FWA (Favorite Website Awards), they launched a public poll where for every year people could vote for the website they consider the most influential.
It was very emotional to have a further view to websites that impressed me so much the first time I saw them during the early years of my career. I could name yugop or neostream, but there were many others and you could easily see how with the time they were getting much more complex, due also to bigger budgets (ie. In Synch Challenge). After the winner for each year people were asked to vote for the decade winner between all of them. I thought it was a very nice initiative but the final result unfortunately really disappointed me.
I definitely don’t want to criticize the quality and the relevance of 2Advanced, that, for its merit, it has been taken as inspiration for too many ripoffs, so just because of this it could be easily defined as the most influential site. But it’s sad to notice that the winning website doesn’t offer so much more a part motion graphics, and of course graphics, the interactivity and the interface design is equals to any old html based website, when Flash in these last 10 years clearly demonstrated its ability on enhancing, in a more functional way, our browser experience with wonderful marriages between design and programming (an example that always fits could be Firstborn, which interface is basically unchanged from many years) .
A missed opportunity that should make Flash people reflects about who they are and what they stand for, or maybe just the end of the association between “annoying flash intro” and flash website.
