Today Adobe announced that they've made a special version of the Flash Player available to Google and Yahoo that allows them to fully index rich Internet applications and other SWF content. The content in rich Internet applications is now available to Google, and that means that RIAs should be easier to find in Google. This is one of the main issues that people ask about when talking about rich Internet applications, so its great to see Google, Yahoo and Adobe working together to solve this problem.

More at the official Google blog and on TechCrunch.

In the past day, both Google and Yahoo have launched new browser plugins that enhance the functionality of the browser. Google in fact has two plugins - Gears (renamed from Google Gears), and a new plugin for Google Earth. Yahoo launched a new plugin called Yahoo BrowserPlus, which will one day allow developers to enhance the functionality of browser based applications by supporting things like drag and drop, desktop notifications etc.. BrowserPlus has a list of plugins or services that it currently enables.

While these companies certainly have the right intentions of improving the user experience, I see end users being the real losers here. The great thing about the web is that when you go to a webpage, you can view the content on it immediately. Remember how frustrating it was when Microsoft introduced HTML specific tags to IE? The same thing is happening again, except this time with plugins from various companies. Want to use this offline application from Google? Need to install the Gears plugin. Want to drag and drop a photo to Flickr? You need the Yahoo plugin. Want to see this 3D map? You need the Google Earth plugin, and you need to be on Windows.

I appreciate the intent of these companies that want to improve the user experience, but forcing users to install new pieces of software is not making things better. Its switching one problem (user experience) for another (installing and managing plugins).

Apparently this is 3D week for Flex applications. Earlier blog posts this week have focused on a 3D application for the Discovery Channel and Volkswagen. Today Yahoo joined the 3D group with a 3D Flex mashup of news information and a global map called NewsGlobe.

The 3D globe takes news items from Yahoo News and then maps the location of those news items onto a map of the world, allowing people to browse news by location, in a slick application.

Mashable is saying that this is Yahoo's response to Google Maps mashups. An interesting thought - it would be cool if Yahoo allows anyone to mashup their geo-encoded data with this application.

More on Yahoo Next and Mashable. Via Computer World.

Yahoo has released a set of Flash and Flex components for rich Internet applications. "ASTRA, the ActionScript Toolkit for Rich Applications, is a collection of Flash and Flex components, code libraries, toolkits and utilties developed by Yahoo! for ActionScript developers." The Flash components include an alert manager, audio playback and a menu bar. The Flex components include colour pickers, an autocomplete manager, time input and more.

Via Ryan Stewart. More details at the Y! Flash blog.

Adobe and Yahoo have teamed up to allow advertising inside of PDF documents. I can see this being useful for a few applications that publish newsletters and documents in PDFs - similar to how some bloggers (like me) use Google AdSense to monetize HTML content. However, the real value to you and other readers of this blog should be the hope that this might lead to the ability to put ads inside of RIAs.

Currently its extremely difficult (not impossible, but difficult) to monetize an RIA that you've built. You can try what Picnik is doing - adding features available to Premium Members only, but there's no real payment framework available to repeat that for many applications. Meaning you'd have to write your own payment infrastructure and handle all the customer service interactions on your own.

Some people are trying to solve this with AIR applications, but there's no one that I know of working on a solution for in browser Flex applications.

I don't know how developers will monetize the applications that they build in the future, but I do know that its great news that Adobe and Yahoo are working together in some fashion. Here's hoping it doesn't stop at PDFs.

Yahoo announced a new version of their Widget runtime that adds support for HTML and Flash based widgets. According to InfoWorld, developers can also use Flex to write widgets that will run on the Yahoo Widget platform.

I went to the Yahoo Widgets site and tried to install a few widgets on my Mac, but couldn't find out how to install the actual Widget runtime. Let me know in the comments if you have more luck than I did.

This is great news for Flex developers - its another possible runtime for the applications that are being built, meaning another output on top of the browser and the desktop (using Adobe AIR) that you can hit without having to change your code.

(Via)

Ryan Stewart has the scoop that the Yahoo Japan team announced at Adobe MAX in Japan that they were building a new Yahoo Mail client in Flex. The current Yahoo Mail application, used by Yahoo in the US and Canada (at least, I presume other countries as well), is written in Ajax. I'm not 100% sure, but I imagine some of the technology for that application comes from Yahoo's acquisition of Zimbra.

The new mail application isn't done yet, but it is in progress. And there's no information that suggests that the existing Ajax mail client will be replaced with this Flex application for the rest of the world. Still, its a great sign when Yahoo and Google start using Flex for their applications. It shouldn't surprise us though. Even Yahoo's Ajax evangelist said that Flex applications were faster to develop than Ajax applications.

Yahoo is set to launch a Flex based version of its instant messenger client, according to a story at TechCrunch. Unfortunately, at this time its not available for users in Canada (at least that's what I'm seeing), so I can't tell you much about it. However, the site does have a few screenshots of the new app:

Of course, the application release comes hot on the heels of Michael Arrington saying that Silverlight from Microsoft was going to make "Flash/ Flex look like an absolute toy". Apparently that wasn't too accurate, because the Yahoo Messenger team chose Flex for the web UI, despite the fact that they have already been working on a WPF version of Messenger for Vista.

Coverage is also available at Center Networks.

Yahoo News has an informative Flash based map that shows you the worldwide minimum wages in local currencies and equivalent spending power in US dollars. Its an informative look at what workers throughout the world are making, and also another example of how companies are using cool technologies to display information in unique ways. Just a little while ago this type of information would have been made available in a table format. Now, you get an interactive map that allows you to easily understand the information.

Many people are confused about the relationship between Flash, Flex and Ajax. Its a bit tricky, because in many cases the three technologies are similar to each other: all three allow web developers to add dynamic elements to static webpages very easily. Flex and Flash are both delivered via the Flash Player (normally used as a plugin to browsers), Ajax applications are delivered via the browser. Ajax is written with JavaScript, XML and HTML components, Flex applications are written with ActionScript, XML and MXML components.

I think that because of these similarities, many people often assume that you'll build your site using Ajax OR Flex OR Flash. The truth is, that's just not the case. There are a number of great examples of sites that are using Flash and Ajax together. Today I'm highlighting two of them: Google Finance and Yahoo Finance.