How Flash Works on Facebook

Posted on by

Facebook PlatformThere’s a bit of “news” today that Facebook is allowing Flash content on pages and profiles. As a lot of the comments have noted, Facebook has been allowing Flash for a long time but there seems to be some confusion about 1) how this works and 2) who will be affected by it.

If you take a look at the FBML spec and specifically the SWF tag you’ll see that Facebook doesn’t allow you to insert Flash content right on the page. Instead you do it using FBML and then Facebook creates an image of the content then requires the user to click on the image before it displays/plays the SWF content. As a result, it’s not like MySpace and the “autoplay” feature isn’t supported. I’ve had emails back and forth with Facebook folks about how we could make that user experience better, so if you have any ideas, let me know. The idea (in my mind) is to remove the click activation but to make sure that we don’t have an onslaught of noise/video when we load a page.

[tags]Flash, Facebook[/tags]

Related posts:

  1. The Bad Flash Experience Inside Facebook
  2. RIA and Flash/Silverlight Debate Spills onto Facebook
  3. “Fanalytics” on Facebook
  4. Facebook and Adobe AIR
  5. AS3 Library for Facebook
  • John

    One trick might be to take some ideas from the YUI Loader that can delay loading things that are out of the viewport. Perhaps that could be used through some kind of priority level so the first one ( or some other mechanism ) plays automatically but the rest need a click.

  • http://visualrinse.com Chad Udell

    A “best-practices” handbook would be in order… Facebook recently added the ratings to apps, perhaps the rating could somehow serve as a way to flag obtrusive or rude flash apps, too?

  • http://www.bunnyhero.org/ bunnyhero

    bebo is also working on flash autoplay on profiles. they are hoping to wrap every flash widget with a flash loader that arbitrates audio between them:

    http://developer.bebo.com/blog/index.php/2008/01/30/snswf-profile-autoplay-for-everyone/

  • chudai

    Facebook now changed their strategy. please update the post