Oh. Flash quite literally changed my life. VKontakte, the most popular Russian social network, launched a game/app platform, along with the first version of it

Oh. Flash quite literally changed my life. VKontakte, the most popular Russian social network, launched a game/app platform, along with the first version of its API, in 2008. At the time, the only kind of apps available was Flash (iframe apps were added later). I did make some, the most popular one being a card game "durak"[1], not really known outside ex-USSR. It worked in real time through sockets with a server I wrote in Java, but I knew little about multithreading, defensive programming, and network protocol design, so the thing bugged out fairly often. Nevertheless, it had hundreds of thousands of installs. There also were tiny ads that you could get from VK through an API call, that's how I made my first money. The interesting part was that the barrier to entry was extremely low thanks to Flash, and growing the user base of your app required no effort whatsoever if the app is good enough. People "installed" apps on their pages, which meant simply adding it to one's own list of apps and granting it permissions. These lists were public — you could open friend's profile and see what they have installed. This meant that you'd get explosive growth by just making something interesting enough so many people would click on it. There was a community of Flash app developers that I was a somewhat prominent part of. I made many friends there, some of them being my close friends to this day. VK team itself organized contests where you had to recreate some part of the website in Flash as closely as possible — I took 2nd place in two of those. That's how I got their attention. There then were other contests that I took part in, to eventually get a job at VK, but that's another story... Fun times. I miss all that tbh. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durak