14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe is launching a new service for its Flash Platform, which could prove a great success for the company, if it all goes according to plan. A great number of the widgets across websites is built with Flash and Adobe wants to be more involved with the distribution of these and, more importantly, with the ad revenue they could provide, so it's launching the Adobe Flash Platform Services starting with Distribution.
“I am excited to announce that the Flash Platform has added services to its collection – Adobe Flash Platform Services. Adobe Flash Platform services are online, hosted services that allow developers to add innovative capabilities to applications with a predictable, cost efficient deployment model,” Puneet Goel, Adobe product marketing manager, wrote. “The first three services that are being delivered are Distribution, Collaboration and Social (coming soon).”
The idea is to provide developers with a unified way of distributing, promoting, monitoring and monetizing their widgets. For the distribution part, Adobe will partner with Gigya, a company that already provides a way for developers and publishers to easily share their content across a number of social platforms. With the partnership, Adobe will offer sharing options for the widgets across 70 destinations like websites, social networks and different platforms including the mobile one.
Destinations include Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle and the developers will be able to monitor how their creations are spread and where. Widgets can also be downloaded to the desktop using Adobe's AIR platform or to mobile devices using Windows Mobile and Symbian. Apple's iPhone is also supported in some fashion, but, because it doesn't support Flash, the app has to be already available in the App Store.
Finally, the service will include other major features with the second one coming later this year in beta and allowing developers to create just one widget, which will work on every major social network, eliminating the need to rewrite the code for the various APIs and platforms. This way, developers will build an app using Adobe's own APIs, which will then take care of converting it to the different architectures.