Flash content to be SEO on Google and Yahoo... Not Live Search

So the news just broke, Adobe will be providing Google and Yahoo with a special Flash player that is optimized to look over the content of your SWF's and crawl its content as if you were the one clicking buttons and navigating within.

What does this mean? well pretty much Adobe is empowering some search engines to see your flash/flex based applications in a similar way as they see your HTML markup, pretty cool isn't it?

In the up run of the news is that your Flash/Flex based RIA's contents will be discoverable by the engines, those same engines that you use daily - or almost all of them - providing with business value to them just right out of the box, as per Ryan's post, there will be no need for changes of what you already have.

On the low run, Google and Yahoo will get to dictate the way they will get to use this player, which means that from now on developers will have to understand and play nice with the rules this guys propose, hopefully following similar approaches... but hey maybe just as Aggiorno exists for XHTML and ASP.NET sites today, there will be similar tools to help you tune up your RIA's for SEO in the future.

As up to today people has been struggling with work-a-rounds to get their RIA's into the engines: hacks as SWFObject and SWFAddress have been in place for sometime helping minimize the pain of SEO in such cases, but then again, what about dynamic views?

Silverlight's ways of embedding itself in pages are very similar to the way SWFObject works, it will pretty much replace the contents of the div element specified in the load method, take in count this happens only if the engine executes, which in the case of an engine spider reading the page will get to consume what ever exists inside this tag, which can be a SEO friendly copy of whatever the users sees. Same applies to SWFObject. Other wise everything is as defined by the markup.

There is still no word out on how long it will take for the engines to start taking advantage of this partnership, yet this is are great news on the way RIA's will become more ubiquitous and set the basics for Silvelright similar technologies to start their engines on, if it is not that they are already on the run!

Now, not to take down the news a bit, but where is Live Search in the list of search engines set to take advantage of this special player?

Update: Adding some links where you can find more points of views

Serge Jespers
Ted Patrick
TechCrunch
InsideRIA

Update: Google talks about how the Flash indexing will work.

Update: here is a follow up to this post, SEO for RIA: the status a few days later.

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Technorati Tags: Flash,RIA,RIE,SEO,Silverlight

Life around the RIA space and beyond

I know I've been out of public word for a bit of time lately - at least in the most extent use of the word (me blog) and have moved my frequency into the tiny world of 140 characters with my twitter voice as Samiq.

There are, though, a lot of great voices out there who have kept us informed and misinformed about what's been going on in the RIA world and surroundings in the time being - hence the necessity no to write and just go express my point of view in the comment spaces or around beers, whenever possible and whatever comes first.

Yet as direct results of these conversations, some people has asked me to come back to my blog and revive it a little bit - or revive it in it's full - bring that same voice I have had whenever there are beers, geeks and some good topic to convey, and make it public.

So here I'm bringing my word to the broad end of the world of bits with my Bits and adding a little flavor to the semantics of web - yes I know, a little cheesy but I have grown my opinion about it... so let's make it worth.

Summarizing a little bit and to create context to what's to come here is a couple of things that have happened in the past that will impact the way I behave in the future:

September 7th, 2007	Silverlight 1.0 gets released to web and with it a couple of applications I worked on made it to the official press release.
September 29th, 2007	Participate of Silverlight DevCamp Chicago with a session about Creating MVC-driven Applications using the Silverlight 1.0 bits.
October 1st-3rd, 2007	Max 07 happened and here I meet a lot of really cool guys from the Adobe community, although what made the trip worth was getting to know the Microsoft's UX Evangelists, lead by Chris Bernard.
November 2007 - January 2008	I work with a great team, on probably one of the most complex Silverlight 1.0 applications up today - yet it has not seen the ray of public light as of this writing.
February 18-20th, 2008	Along with my peers from LA, NY, Atlanta and Costa Rica, participate on a private Silverlight 1.0 & 2.0 training prepared by ourselves. Now call it knowledge sharing!
March 5-7th, 2008	Mix 08 happened and here I meet a lot of really cool people and had great conversations around the world of RIE - some of them I recorded in the form of video, yet to be published as a documentary. Got to see Ka, amazing show! Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 is released to web.
April 11th, 2008	I get a call
April 14th, 2008	I attend a meeting and get introduced to a cool project
April 15th, 2008	I go to dinner with probably 1 of the most brilliant minds in Costa Rica
April 18th, 2008	I quit Schematic as Software Architect and join Artinsoft as Technology Evangelist to its Research Division.
May 9th, 2008	I finish my work at Schematic, and with it I finish my pass with one of the greatest interactive agencies around the world.
May 19th, 2008	I start part time with Artinsoft and focus on the marketing strategy for Aggiorno Beta 2 with the team.
May 30th, 2008	Go on vacations
June 3rd, 2008	Aggiorno goes into Beta 2. New interim web site goes live.
June 9th, 2008	I start full time with Artinsoft and it's Aggiorno team.
June 12th, 2008	I fly to Seattle to join BarCamp Seattle and attend meetings in Redmond.
June 13th, 2008	Attend Thingamajiggr with Carlos, head of Artinsoft Research.
June 14th, 2008	Participate of BarCamp Seattle with two sessions: one on The Reality of SEO and Web Accesibility along with Chris Wilson from the IE8 team and Jermiah Andrick from the Live Search team; and the second one on a RIA Panel with Scott Barnes from the Silverlight team and Kurt Brockett, from Identity Mine.
June 16-20th, 2008	Tour Redmond Campus from building to building showing Aggiorno to different teams and getting lots of feedback and support.
June 18th, 2008	Visited Scott on his office and end up co-writing the first preview of a MVC framework for Silverlight 2.0. - those kind of things that happen just because, so don't ask.
June 23th, 2008	I fly back to Costa Rica and miss the first Costa Rican twitter get-together.
June 22nd, 2008	I start writing this while exploring ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 stuff for a freelance gig.

Ok, so now that you know where I've been during this time (at least the portions that are public), it's time to keep the fingers warm and shoot and connect directly to me head to start getting some word out of my thoughts, and make them happen!

So here it is guys! I am back baby!!

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Technorati Tags: Nexus,C#,Silverlight,Samiq,Ideas,ASP.NET,MVC,RIE,RIA,MAX,MIX,SilverlightDevCamp,BarCampSeattle,Schematic,Artinsoft,Aggiorno