Hal Rucker is CEO and co-founder of Smalltown. He was previously president of Rucker Design Group, an agency specializing in corporate identity, packaging, Web and user interface design. During its 10 years of operation, RDG's projects included corporate branding and user interface design for the original Hotmail, the WebTV logo, client software information architecture for Ariba, user experience design for several Apple products, and product design for the original version of Placeware. Rucker Design Group was purchased by Excite@Home in 2000. After serving as VP of Professional Services at Laszlo Systems, he started Smalltown. Hal has a B.S. and M.S. in Product Design from Stanford. Visit the company blog here.

Most web services today are trying to make their pages as numerous as possible for search engines, and as bare as possible for conserving bandwidth and server power. Why was Smalltown built using Flash? How do the benefits outweigh the costs?

Before we chose a technology or created wireframes for our user interface, we interviewed many small business owners and observed them throughout their workday. We learned several important things that were counter-intuitive. In particular, we discovered the user group we were designing for prefers the functionality we could provide in a rich Internet application rather than a typical Web 2.0 site. Our audience is more comfortable using Word and QuickBooks than it is with Flickr. Once we knew we were setting out to build an application that lived in a Web browser, we chose to write our application in ActionScript 2.0 and run it using the Flash 8 Player.

The most important advantages of building our Web app in Flash are: (1) there are certain desktop-like UI elements we simply could not build on other popular platforms; (2) AJAX is a real big headache to test across all browsers and operating systems. For the purposes of our small team of developers, Flash is truly “write once, run anywhere”; and (3) our business model is based on the idea of providing everyone - small businesses, religious organizations, civic groups, schools and local residents - with an easy and inexpensive way to have a rich Web presence without building a website. We decided Flash was the best technology for making that happen.

What are the costs of using Flash? Well, I must say the problems with Flash are often badly misunderstood and based on criticisms of earlier versions of the product. Consider this:

• The file for the entire Smalltown application is about the same size as Yahoo!’s homepage. Some people reported our site was slow on launch day, but our servers were getting slammed for the first time and now we’re learning how to further optimize Smalltown for even better performance.
• Once the Smalltown .swf is stored in the browser cache, subsequent server hits are small.
• Every Smalltown Webcard has a unique URL and popular search engines index each Webcard. We simply don’t have the same requirements most websites have for searchability.

The known downsides to our decision to use Flash are:

• Our site requires Flash Player version 8, which isn’t ubiquitous… Yet.
• Our Web application runs slowly on old computers that have very slow CPUs. Bandwidth isn’t that big a problem for us; slow computers are a bigger concern.

Unless they live in Beverly Hills, when you ask people where they live, they usually don’t reply with their zip code. They typically tell you the name of their town. If they live in a big city, they answer with the name of their neighborhood. That’s how we think about small towns. It’s a matter of identity.

For our model, Palo Alto, CA is a “small town”. But so is the Mission District in San Francisco, and SOHO in New York. Don’t take our name too literally. In addition, our system allows users to search metatowns, such as Los Angeles, that are made up of many small towns or neighborhoods. We just don’t have enough sites running yet to show off that feature.

Sorry, I can’t be more specific, but I can assure you we have plans to expand, there is an aggressive timetable, and we will include large cities divided up into neighborhoods.

More and more companies that provide local information are integrating social networking features into their services, yet Smalltown does not seem to do so. Why is this? Do you consider Smalltown a Web 2.0 service? Are there any plans to integrate more social features into the website?

Like many Web 2.0 services, Smalltown’s content is user-generated. In addition, much of our content is merchant-generated. Our key differentiator is the synergy that occurs when both types of content interact in one place. Here’s an example.

Let’s say I live in Burlingame, CA and I’m going through a mid-life crisis and feel an urgent need to learn how to play rock guitar. I could post a request on Smalltown that asks “Can anyone recommend a good guitar teacher?” A trusted neighbor could reply and say “Yes, my son takes lessons at the Burlingame Guitar Center. I’ve attached their Webcard with all their information.” After reading the Webcard, I notice that the Burlingame Guitar Center is recommending Ray’s Music as the best place to buy a guitar. (That’s a nice local discovery.) Then I notice on the Ray’s Music Webcard that they’ve attached another Webcard about the High School Musical coming up in two weeks, and another Webcard for the local charity for which they’re raising money.

Smalltown’s version of social networking is an online conversation among all types of local entities regarding any type of local content. A Webcards, the technology for enabling those conversations, is a generalized data container; it’s up to our users to decide if they want to use Webcards for sharing information about babysitters, announcing a garage sale, or making new friends online.