“What about search engine indexing?” is one of the most asked questions I get when I’m at events or customer meetings. Not many people know that Google actually already indexes SWF files.

Currently almost any text a user can see as they interact with a SWF file on your site can be indexed by Googlebot and used to generate a snippet or match query terms in Google searches. Additionally, Googlebot can also discover URLs in SWF files and follow those links, so if your SWF content contains links to pages inside your website, Google may be able to crawl and index those pages as well.

Yesterday Google announced that they have now expanded their SWF indexing capabilities.

Last month we expanded our SWF indexing capabilities thanks to our continued collaboration with Adobe and a new library that is more robust and compatible with features supported by Flash Player 10.1. Additionally, thanks to improvements in the way we handle JavaScript, we are also now significantly better at recognizing and indexing sites that use JavaScript to embed SWF content. Finally, we have made improvements in our video indexing technology, resulting in better detection of when a page has a video and better extraction of metadata such as alternate thumbnails from Flash technology based videos. All in all, our SWF indexing technology now allows us to see content from SWF files on hundreds of millions of pages across the web.

Read the full blog post on the Google Webmaster Central blog.

NewTeeVee Live invited Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch for a fireside chat yesterday to talk about HTML5 and what Adobe is doing to support HTML5 development as well as talk about recent comments suggesting that Flash is a battery drainer.

“Playing rich content uses more battery than non-rich content whichever technology you use.”

The best way to measure the impact and relevance of a technology is probably to look at job openings. According to the Wall Street Journal the demand for Flash developers in Silicon Valley has suddenly surged:

With the advent of online social gaming start-ups such as Zynga Game Network Inc. and others—many of which make online games that involve Flash technology—demand for Flash engineers has suddenly surged.

Mochi Media (one of the largest online gaming networks) says it is hard to find good Flash engineers.

To get around the lack of Flash engineers, Mr. Hsu says Mochi Media tries to hire engineers who know programming languages such as Java and then train them to use Flash. “It’s a six-month time investment, but most can pick up Flash very quickly,” he says.

Be sure to read the rest of the article on the WSJ site. Oh… and ehr… Flash on!

Earlier this morning Vincent Van Quickenborne (Belgian minister for ICT, telco, economy and reform) moderated a debate with Neelie Kroes (Vice President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe). Vincent Van Quickenborne was asking his Twitter followers for questions he should ask her. I asked what her plans were for the outrageous data roaming charges in Europe. Her answer sounded like music to my ears:

This is fantastic news!

Most of the European carriers are owned by only a handful of big telcos (like France Telecom, Vodafone, …) and this should be a no-brainer. But they obviously make a lot of money from roaming and if no one tells them to change their price structure, they won’t. Now that Neelie’s on the case it looks like data roaming across Europe may soon/finally become affordable.

PS: It’s great to see Neelie Kroes on Twitter!

Steve Jobs (via TechCrunch): Intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.

That’s the first thing I read this morning… I agree with Greg Slepak (CEO of TaoEffect) who wrote:

Crappy developers will make crappy apps regardless of how many layers there are.

That doesn’t mean that all developers using a specific layer will build crappy apps.

Chroma Circuit by Bowlerhat Games is a very good example. Chroma Circuit started out as a Flash based web game. It was one of the first apps that got packaged as an iPhone app using the Packager for iPhone. Apple didn’t seem to mind playing Chroma Circuit on their iDevices as they featured it as a staff pick on iTunes a while ago.

Fickleblox by BlueSkyNorth is another good example. This application started out as a Flash Lite game and is thereby available on a broad range of devices. It was also packaged using the Packager for iPhone and thus available in the app store.

Both applications (and there are dozens like this in the app store today) are fun to play, easy to use and perform well on the iDevice. You can hardly call that sub-standard! You can also hardly say that they hinder the progress of the platform. In fact… I think it is Apple who is now effectively hindering the progress of the iDevice platform. By allowing “intermediate layers” like Flash but also Unity, Titanium, MonoTouch, Corona, … the platform has become more open and appealing to non Obj-C/C/C++ developers. More developers (regardless of which technology they use) on the platform = more applications in the appstore. I wonder how many apps in the appstore today were built using one of these intermediate layers…

I’m with Adobe and all other intermediate layer providers, for that matter!