Search Engines Play Nicely with Flash. Finally?

It’s nice to see that Adobe has finally given the keys for Google and Yahoo to index SWF files. It’s 2008 and this has been a long, long, long time coming.

One would probably ask, “why now?” and there would be a variety of answers but a few come into mind. SEO is increasingly a big business and the obvious benefits of practicality would immensely benefit everyone. But, the rise of Safari and a new generation of Web 2.0 apps that had Flash like features without the use of Flash must have spooked Adobe and ramped up development. 

The increasing rise of Web 2.0 websites devoted to app-ware is only the beginning of the developmental shift that increasingly relies on HTML/CSS and less on the buggeries of Flash development. While Flash will undoubtedly have it’s place, the era of a large nested Flash site is essentially over. This new ability at search engine crawling will not change the fact that nested Flash sites are (mostly) dead. 

Classifieds and the New Web

Walmart.com has introduced classifieds. Powered by Web 2.0 startup Oodle, Walmart is offering free classifieds as an expanded part of it’s web services. While the technical challenge must have been relatively simple, an integration of Oodle’s services, the strategy is a natural fit for Walmart.

The business of serving the local community has always been at the core of Walmart but a digital entry underlines the expanded ambitions. This entry also solidifies the coming death of local newspapers. By failing to effectively create an effective web model, newspapers have acquiesced classifieds to free competitors like Walmart and of course, Craigslist.

A lesson from this isn’t the death of newspapers, that has been a well documented joke for a while, it’s that the web enables anyone to rapidly enable services into new segments with relative ease. A Walmart and Oodle partnership is a win-win for both firms because technology development is often challenging and Oodle gets dramatically bigger exposure.

Of course, whether Walmart will succeed is an entirely different story.