Adobe, Facebook introduce new Flash developer tools
Adobe and Facebook are trying to make it easier for any web developer to build Flash-based games and other applications using Facebook data, by co-releasing a new Actionscript 3 client library. Flash is already used in a wide variety of online video and music players, as well as powering many interactive elements of online games on the web. Up until this point, though, developers have had to figure out how to integrate Flash with Facebook on their own.
So expect to see more features like throwing the bowling ball in Playfish’s Facebook bowling game application, Bowling Buddies. Playfish and 11 more of the top 20 application developers on Facebook are already using Flash. The new library makes it easier for them — and smaller developers — to add interactive Flash elements together with Facebook social data.
It’s not just a matter of Flash showing up more on Facebook apps, though — many sites using Facebook Connect also use Flash. Facebook and Adobe plan to integrate Facebook features like status updates and note creation with the ActionScript application programming interface on Facebook applications and within Flash-based sites on the web.
The code is free, open source (just the library, not Flash itself) and available for download here.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.