Last week, Macromedia announced Central, their new occasionaly-connected application host. Central is a connection-aware desktop app container for Flash-based rich-media modules. The initial release has a pretty slick blog reader module; you download your feeds when you have connectivity, and you can read them later when you're offline.

One of the most exciting things about Central is that AOL is exposing the Presence API for AOL IM inside Central. This presents interesting opportunities for casual games, especially multiplayer, presence-aware casual games. Because you have to write your own user-interface for any AOL IM data, you could use the free AOL IM peer to peer network as a way to send data snippets for a Flash game. I have a couple projects underway that I might try this out on. The point is, this is a cheap, easy way to make peer to peer games, which could really do wonders for rhetorical games.

The only problem is, you'd have to play the game within the Central application. And I do wonder if Central is, well, too centralized to make this an appealing way to run applications. Jeremy Allaire envisions a future in which this won't be such a problem, but for now I'm not sure.