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Flash
Many if not all of you (I consider you semi-advanced web users if you read uneasy) have come in contact with some form of Flash. Be it google video or youtube, myspace music player or http://2advanced.com. Flash has become a very wonderful medium for use on the web. Using a lot of the same asynchronous properties for years that are now becoming very popular amoungst the web community thanks to AJAX.

The olden days of flash were plagued with insane load times, bad audio quality, and static often unimpressive content. For those of you who do not follow web technologies Flash took a big leap recently by moving over to a full OOP programming platform with Action Script 2.0 and has become a serious medium for programming web applications for crossbrowser/platform access.

Anyway with these leaps and improvements in the way Flash works and handles dynamic content and situations I have noticed Flash becoming more prevalent accross the web over the past year and a half. With the new capabilities come new features/ideas/forms of using Flash. Well in todays XML world with RSS and such Flash has reached the age of access to open, standardized data.

Web Tops
We all have used a “web top” most frequently Google.com/ig or Yahoo’s flavor. Well recently a few Flash developers began developing a flash based version (http://webtop.gritwire.com/ or http://goowy.com) that is suppossed to mimic an OS running in your browser. Complete with games, editable RSS feeds, e-mail notifications, streaming video and audio support, etc. Could we be seeing the early stages of something on the horizon? Well web 3.0 be an all encapsulated web service using standalone online program that will irradicate the need for cross browser standards?

I know the above statement is far fetched and nearly idiotic, but think about it… and don’t be to harsh on me.

My mind begins to wander… but I want to know what you people, the readers think.