I was just reading an article on a web site about how alot of websites in the 1990s were badly designed, with things like spalsh pages, complicated background pictures, too much flash and numerous other things.
As far as I can tell, this is mostly websites made by people who didn't really know what they were doing.
Now I know that alots of sites around today do look alot better, and are easier to read etc, but has this problem really just moved over to Myspace? Rather than people creating bad personal websites, they are just creating bad MySpace (and similar) pages.
However, the excessive flash usage doesn't seem to be restriced to myspace. I hardly seem to be able to go a couple of days without coming accross a site which has some unnecessary flash on it, be it something quite useless, or a video. Or multiple videos on the same page.
Another thing which seems to be taking us back in time is video. In this age of High Definition television and things like digital TV and DVDs, theres seems to be an increasing amount of bad quality video appearing (both on the internet and the TV) from mobile telephones. Most of this is significantly worse quality than a video I made about 4 years back with a VHS-C camcorder (and later copied onto VHS). YouTube certainly arn't helping by making the quality of the videos on their site bad, even if the source was good. Since fast connections and enormous hard drives are quite readily avaliable these days to both consumers and the big companies like Google, there is no excuse for limiting the quality of videos. As far as I'm aware, the Flash video format isn't what limits the quality as I'm sure I have seen one or two good quality flash videos.
Anotherexample is audio. Is it not clear to people that an old CD or an even older well looked after vinyl record will more than likely produce a better sound than a 128kbps MP3? And that headphones will produce better sound than a small speaker in a mobile phone?