Collab.nl

Ran across a pretty interesting chat service at Collab.nl

It's a flash chat application geared in some way toward multi-user development. All I saw there was people chatting and having a good time. If you've got a mic and webcam you can go there and get your chat on.

This app kindof puts AJAX in perspective against something like Flash. At this time there's really no way to do in javascript what Collab.nl does with Flash. Javascript would need streaming video libraries coded native to the os and a fast server component similar to the Flash Media Server.

Macromedia is in a really great position since lots of video content(like YouTube and GoogleVideo) is being distributed through Flash. In addition all of the rich-client apps that people are doing with AJAX can really be done better with the Flash platform. They'll be prettier, they'll work faster, and they'll be able to be ... umm ... well ... richer. I'm talking video and sound to go with your non-reloading AJAX form page.

So Flash seems to be the future. How can we release and extend it? We need to take the kernel of the Flash idea, build upon it, and explode it. Move as much machine code to the client as possible. That's really what flash does. Integrate into the browser, the ability to download and run os-specific, optimized, multi-media code. Require the code to be signed and people can start building trust with developers of this new platform. Any ideas?