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October 27, 2006

A good friend of mine by the name of Geoff Stearns is responsible for a little open source 'thing' called SwfObject.

Here's a little history about it:

SwfObject used by just about everyone to embed swf media on websites. When I say everyone, I mean everyone. Even Macromedia themselves abandoned the crappy embed methods their Flash authoring environment ships with, and use SwfObject on the Adobe website. Don't believe me? Visit their site and view source.

If SwfObject doesn't sound too familiar, you might know it under its former name -- FlashObject. Unfortunately, a few months ago as Geoff was writing an article for Macrodobe when their legal team reversed position on his use of the term 'Fash' and politely suggested Geoff rename his project as soon as possible. I suggested that Geoff just ask them for an official license so they legally avoid any sort of trademark dilution-- Adobe, however, didn't like the idea. Then I suggesed Geoff call it Swifilis-- I saw an enormous demand for "Spread(ing) Swifilis" t-shirts. Unfortunately Geoff wasn't fond of that particular idea.

Fast forward a bit, and Geoff tosses me an instant message: someone in Asia bought SwfObject.com . There was a blog ( or something ) on it in Japanese (now it seems to be a Chinese template page). I tried to convince Geoff to get swfobject.org ( he hosts the project @ blog.deconcept.com/swfobject ), but he wouldn't.

Geoff didn't think that was necessary, and long story short- I ended up buying SwfObject.org and making it the Geoff Stearns fansite with the simple goal of overtaking Geoff's blog in search rankings.

BTW, you can read the whole story about that here:
About SwfObject.org

Regretfully, I never have time to update Geoff's fansite-- but I recently made his girlfriend an account-- so we might start getting some good content.

Getting back to the point of this all...

One of the biggest users of SwfObject is YouTube. Believe it or not, every single video hosted YouTube.com is displayed to its loyal users via SwfObject ( syndicated videos use the standard object/embed tag pairing ).

It wouldn't be a stretch to say that SwfObject is a core component of the YouTube framework for video delivery.

In fact... One could even argue that... were SwfObject to spontaneously stop existing , YouTube would cease to function-- completely. Instead of staring at videos, the sites X-million users would be staring at blank divs-- void of the flash content that brings them action, drama, comedy, politics ( and occasionally softcore pornography ) on a daily basis.

YouTube would be NullTube. NoTube. They would come to a grinding halt.

Who would want to stare and share blank divs all day long? Surely not you! Most decidedly, not I.

You might be thinking right now "well hey, wouldn't they just use something else to embed videos?"

Hopefully you're not, because that would be an incredibly stupid thought. Anyone with an IQ higher than a peanut knows that SwfObject is the only legitimate option for Flash embeds-- and that the other options are vastly inferior.

Now I don't mean to say that the SwfObject alternatives suck, but, well, they they do. And so do the people who use them. All the cool kids use SwfObject.

Are you a cool kid? Check your Swf embed technology. It says a lot.

And you know who uses the SwfObject alternatives? The Terroroists. Yep-- that's right-- terrorists. The terrorists are using SwfObject. The Terrorists are using The SwfObject-- but The Google is not. Terrorists like Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden and other evil doers. And you know what these evil doers do with their "not SwfObject" ? Evil. They do evil. YouTube is owned by Google. Google's motto? "Don't Be Evil"

Google-not evil.
AlQaeda- evil.

SwfObject == Good
Not SwfObject == Evil Doers

'Nuff Said.

Now when I say that YouTube is using SwfObject extensively, I mean extensively-- It's on every one of their pages.

A typical YouTube page has this much generated data:

• 80,774 k - HTML
• 29,459 k - YouTube JS
• 5,974 k - SwfObject JS

Geoff's code makes up, on average, 20% of the total YouTube client side code (javascript) and 5% of the total YouTube client side html/js combination.

There's about 10k of graphics on each page... so you could lower those numbers a bit if that makes you feel better.

Now you're probably going to say: what about the videos? It's a video site!

Well I'm not factoring in the size of videos simply because they're submitted by users, not made by YouTube -- they're shared content, not produced content or infrastructure.

Going onwards...

Having worked a few years on websites, I feel confident saying that backend work takes about 50-70% of time / budget on most sites, with the rest going to design and frontend.

Sometimes a few people in marketing make way more money for taking 'clients' to dinner, and making exaggerated promises that others have to keep. I don't like to think about those people - they make me mad.

If I had more patience, I'd try to factor in the amount of work in open source software that run different parts of the backend -- I know YouTube uses Python, I've heard they use a free os, and a free server. But I'll just say that there are free alternatives for all those other things: Perl / python / php / ruby / c ; multiple linux / bsd flavors ; apache , nginx , lighttpd .

But, as mentioned above, there are no decent free alternatives for SwfObject-- its the only embed worth using. That's why its not just popular, its necessary. (There are free alternatives, but they're not decent in any way shape or form. )

YouTube runs on SwfObject. YouTube exists because of SwfObject. YouTube wouldn't exist if it weren't for SwfObject.

And SwfObject isn't alone-- tons of other open source things make YouTube work.

People gave their time and energy freely to make those things -- why not give back to them?

So, I stand here now and say this:

Dear YouTube-
Do the right thing.
Take 5% of your monetizaton, and give it to open source projects and developers.
Give a chunk of change to the team that makes your DB app
Give a chunk to your primary languages
Give a chunk to your OS builders
Give a token to Geoff Stearns.

Specifically, give Geoff Stearns one-quarter of 1 percent of your monetization ( 0.25%) or 4.25 Million dollars. He's responsible- single handedly - for at least .25% of your front end code.

It's the right thing to do.

It's the honest thing to do.

It what you know you should do.

So do it.

Disclaimer: Geoff promised me a finders fee. But really. Do it.

Posted by Jonathan at October 27, 2006 12:23 PM

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