I'm in the planning and learning stages of building a facebook game. For the past year my foremost question has been, "Flash or HTML5?". Rather than try to decide the answer to that, I thought I would give the markets for both some more time to mature and learn how to design the game and how to manage the server element.
Over the last year I've devoured thousands of pages of text concerning game development and business development, along with getting a solid footing in AS3, python, php, C# and javascript. So, I'm most interested in picking a system that is best for the job rather than, for example, starting off assuming the game logic will be in python because that's what I enjoy most.
The game is at its core a strategy game and I plan to use many mobile phones extensively in addition to the standard facebook "invite all your friends" features. The graphics won't be flashy and will in most places be rather flat because of the thematic elements, rather than 3d isometric like farmville or other flash facebook games.
So from a technological perspective HTML5 doesn't have any real advantage that I can see over flash, and neither does flash have any real advantage over HTML5. If you see that one has a clear advantage over the other then I would be happy to hear that in your comments.
I have five primary questions that I need your opinion on:
1) Which platform makes better sense for building a facebook game considering the future market trends?
2) Which platform has better inherent elements to help prevent cheating? (like flash being compiled into a .swf vs javascript being in plain text)
3) Which platform would be most attractive to the best game development talent for future hires?
4) Which platform is easiest to take technology from one game and use it for other future games? (like developing isometric graphics in flash)
5) Which platform is easiest to develop with a team?