First the iPad, and now a debate on the relevance of Flash. Apple continues to ignore it and touts HTML5 as the future. Google is also pushing HTML5 on YouTube, with other video sites starting to follow suit. Even Mozilla is disabling it in its new mobile browser, Maemo. Clearly, the death knell for Adobe’s most controversial product is getting louder than ever.
But it’s still all talk, all noise. How about some real action? Thankfully, over at Binary Bonsai, Michael Heilemann has taken it upon himself to drop Flash for the whole month of February as a response to this tweeted challenge:
All those who think no flash on ipad is A-OK please uninstall flash from your current browser, use that for a month then get back to me.
Installing a Flash blocker isn’t really a groundbreaking exercise and is tamer than uninstalling Flash completely, but now is the best time to figure out how dependent we are on it.
So can you survive sans Flash? I won’t go out of my way to defend it nor suffer from withdrawal without it, but the status of HTML5 video alone seems troubling enough.
More importantly, most discussions cover only the question of replacing Flash video, not other applications like games. That would be an even tougher nut to crack, even with the dawn of purely Javascript-based games.
Microblogging is cool, with Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, and Pownce, among others. The latter now have added a mobile interface, apparently not really meant to go online already, but I tried it out, of course.
Before we get to the video, I’d just like to say that I enjoy Pownce a lot. I’m even a pro user. It’s not the place for everyone, but I’ve found interesting people there, made connections, and so on. I guess you could do the same on Facebook or Twitter, but it haven’t worked nearly as well for me as Pownce has.
If you haven’t checked it out do say hi, I’m at pownce.com/tdh. Give a shout in the comments if you need an invite, although they are rarely hard to come by.
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You see those arrows there, in the Google Adsense ad? They let you browse ads, within the ad, so if you don’t like what you’re seeing you can just go ahead and scroll up and down within the ad. You might or you might not see these ads in the sidebar here, and not all ads get the arrows, but if you’re not then I videotaped it for you, with my two cents on the matter.
Cranky? I guess so.
My first reaction to the presidential candidate debates was, “Wow, what a cool idea.” I naively believed that people could ask some really good questions that would no doubt be more interesting than the standard, “What are you going to do about health care?” ones. Don’t get me wrong; that is a valid question for any candidate in any country, but that is what always gets asked. I was looking forward to seeing hard hitting questions that struck beyond the norm of political debates. But alas, that was not what I got.
Ask And Yee Shall Receive
Unfortunately, that sub heading is not for the YouTube participants. It was the moderators that got what they wanted. What I am trying to say is that for the most part, we got the same standard questions, asked in a slightly dumber/funnier way. Now, I am not suggesting that the questions were set up. I am only saying that the odds are in favor of some people asking those types of questions. The moderators probably looked for those, and got rid of the toughest ones.
Ground Breaking?
No. Absolutely not. Unless of course asking the same question, but only you record yourself in a chicken suit with wipe effects is considered ground breaking. Seriously, what part of this was ground breaking? That it was YouTube? Big deal. The only thing that was different was that it was kind of funny, but more in a sad way than a “haha” way…
If anything, the debate proved two major phenomena:
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Overhyped Online Services:
Sure YouTube was innovative… 2 years ago. But lets face it; there are far better services now than YouTube (design-wise and content-wise). The mainstream media will unfortunately always be ten steps behind the cutting edge stuff that you and I know about.
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American Politics are a Joke:
Literally, these debates transformed what little seriousness there was left in the American political system. I mean, the banner and flags and strange rallies with people wearing buttons of the candidate’s face is weird enough; I am curious about how the rest of the world is seeing and/or making fun of us…
I suppose I answered my own title here; it is a resounding waste of time. Unfortunately, it appears that the format was a hit and will take place again. Next year, the dramatic hamster will ask a question about social security…
This post was written by J David Macor.
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