Flash and Flex in Social Media

I can safely say that almost all of you here have at least 1 social media profile. Be it on Facebook, Flickr, StumbleUpon, MySpace, Digg, Reddit, Twitter etc… and you are connected to at least a handful of people, if not thousands.

Social interaction on the web is as common today as getting a cup of coffee. I remember in the year 2000 I would lose track of my friends if they did not have an email address. Today it has come to the point where you can become famous due to your social profile. This gives rise to a whole new market to tap into, especially if you are a developer.

Sites like digg and twitter have API’s that let developers tap into the immense amount of data that they publish. With tools like Flash and Flex you can create some pretty interesting apps, that can either be desktop based or used as a widget for a blog or website.

Using Flash In Social Media With A Purpose

Some of the most creative Flash based apps to date, for me personally, can be seen on digg labs. I like Arc the best, they have even made it available as a screensaver {though I have not tried it}. In the end though, those apps are nothing but a novelty feature and cannot be used as a substitute for the main site itself. So the attraction for the user on the long term slowly diminishes.

When you look at the apps that have been built around Twitter which use Flash/Flex like the official twitter widget, Twhirl, TweetDeck and Spaz among others, you can immediately see the purpose behind building them, which is to help you in using the twitter service more robustly. You can basically use any of the desktop apps as a substitute for the main twitter site.

This is a great example of using a publishing tool together with data to satisfy a need, while capturing long term interest.

As a last example, I would like to tell you about a site called Etsy, while not a social media site in the true sense of the word it relies heavily on the basic concept of it. Etsy is a site where you can create a shop to sell your own handmade goods. They have used Flash very creatively to tap into the content on their site to create some fun search tools, you can see what I’m talking about on their Buy page.

Some of the better ones are search by color, time machine and geo locator.

These are some examples of Flash and Flex being used to make social content more engaging, and even profitable!

If you are going to develop an app in the future geared towards the social media crowd remember one very important point, build it to satisfy a purpose. Novelty is just that, a novelty.