Reminiscing: most influential Internet moments of the decade

Posted by Serge Jespers on Nov 20, 2009 in Flash Platform, Flash Player | 2 comments

The Webby Awards just published a great list of the ten most influential Internet moments of the decade. It’s great to see that they didn’t forget to give props to Flash Player for causing the online video revolution:

Online video revolution (2006)
In 2006, a perfect storm of faster bandwidth, cheaper camcorders, and the groundbreaking use of Adobe’s Flash 9 video player by YouTube combined to launch the online video revolution. The trifecta led to a boom in homemade and professional content – the Diet Coke and Mentos guys, lonelygirl15, SNL’s Lazy Sunday, and Senator George Allen’s “macacagate” – that has reshaped everything from pop culture to politics.
From http://www.webbyawards.com/press/topwebmomentsdecade.php

While it’s a great acknowledgement of one of the great things Flash has done for the web, I personally think Flash had caused a revolution way before that. Before Flash, the web was pretty dull and the only animation you would see on a site was perhaps a piece of text in a <blink> tag or an animated GIF. I’m sure you’ll all remember those and some of you may also remember the early days of Flash. If you’re in Belgium, you may remember the early days with the sites for Peter Hoogland, the Big Brother sites and the Idols site. The early days with sites like Gabocorp, Eye4U, NRG and later DerBauer. The early days with amazing Flash work from Joshua Davis, Branden Hall, Mano1, Yugo Nakamura and the crazy Flash based gadgets from Phillip Torrone. The early days of the very first Flashforward conferences in San Francisco and New York (I still have the attendee workbooks)…

Back then I would have never thought that I would one day work for Adobe. I remember the Adobe keynotes at Flashforward very well. I remember the Adobe speakers were the only ones wearing suits (Not kidding). I also remember the Adobe Flashforward party in NYC very well. We were all driven to a club somewhere. The party started out really quietly (food and drinks included) but then at (I think) midnight, the music stopped playing, the houselights were dimmed and the stage lights were switched on. And then the crowd was completely surprised by the performance that started. Adobe had hired Run DMC to perform live at their party… That was absolutely amazing and it was probably the best conference party ever!

Aaah man… The early days… I better stop now… I’m starting to feel old ;-) I do wonder who was there and is now following me on Twitter and/or my blog…

Flash on!