Thread: How flashy

Originally Posted by dex71

Pretty much sums-up my reasons for never opening a MyFace account.

MySpace always felt like the second-coming of GeoCities; like the Web-Two-Dot-Oh version of really ugly web pages. I did start a FaceBook account because it was (basically) a business necessity. Later we were thinking about building a version of our app into FaceBook and I wound up attending the first FaceBook Developers conference.

I met many smart, engaging, and motivated FaceBook engineers who were doing very interesting work and were going out of their way to share it with anyone who would listen. Most of them struck me as people I'd enjoy hanging out with socially. They were all about The Social. In fact, it seemed like none of them could go longer than 3 minutes without mentioning The Social Graph.

They couldn't wait to tell everyone about the exponential growth in their user base, and the similar growth in the data they were collecting on their users, and the extent to which they were willing to make most of that data available to anyone who wanted to develop on their platform. It was very odd to me that all of these very bright and motivated people who couldn't shut up about Social had obviously given absolutely zero thought to the actual social implications of what they were doing.


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Originally Posted by DJ Mr. White

Being a lot is lost in translation with text, the mom joke was directed at the edit text explanation.

No, I got that. But the mom example is perfect (so, thank you). If I try to set up Flash on mom's computer in a way that allows any sort of control, it makes mom's computing experience bad. If I set up Flash in the way Flash wants me to (always on, always tracking, always silently updating itself), it makes mom susceptible to every zero-day vulnerability - and there is no way they're fixing the old ones faster than they're introducing new ones.

Originally Posted by DJ Mr. White

At least in the case of flash, it will die soon enough. Java will still be here for a while for client-side stuff despite its vulnerabilities.

I ditched client-side Java a while ago - before Sun died (and Oracle dissected the corpse for parts). That one was sort of sad for me. I liked the idea of the JVM (and JIT too). It's a solid tech, but they could never solve the client-side puzzle. Now that I think about it I suppose there's a decent argument to be made that Flash has persisted so long because they were willing to shit on the client.


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