I remember the time that when you wanted some cool interaction you needed to do it flash. That meant learning a hole new language (ActionScript), plus learning how to use flash. Then the hole web 2.0 came to be, AJAX. It sounds more like some kind of soap… well in a way it is, you could say it cleaned up a lot of how web programming was done. Now for AJAX all you needed was your old school basic knowledge of XHTML, CSS and JS.
Many of the the cool features in websites are no longer done with Flash, because you need the plug-in for your browser, updating it was tedious, not SEO friendly, etc. AJAX with its easy to use libraries (JQuery, Spry, etc) has made the life for us programmers much easier, and fun. For many cool effects all you need to do is cut and paste.
So where does Flash stand in this hole World Wide Web. Well without flash you would not have great sites like YouTube, uStream, Hulu, etc. Flash is the dominant environment for video, specially interactive video. But now with HTML 5 and its new one line of code insert video tag, things could change. Flash is also a big player on the new AR (Augmented Reality) technology, which looks very good.
Who knows what will happened with Web 3.0, if there ever be one, or if its already here. The way we program for the web has changed, and will continue to change, for the better… hopefully.