Social browser Flock: too little, too late [BT broadband office]

Social browser Flock: too little, too late

Posted 18 July 2007 at 8:34AM by Simon Dickson in Connecting to the Internet

Just under two years ago, Flock was widely heralded as the future of web browsing. It took the Firefox browser, and added extra features from the emerging world of 'social networking'. You could view and upload photos from/to sites like Flickr, store your bookmarks in an online service like del.icio.us, and write new posts for your blog, all from within the browser environment itself. In a world where such tools were still niche, it was visionary stuff.

The social web has seen stellar growth since, but progress at Flock has been slow. The first major release in quite some time, v0.9, has finally become available for download - to something of a 'so what?' response. Countless add-ons are now available for (ordinary) Firefox, giving it most of the cutting-edge functionality promised by Flock... and in some cases, more. So do we even need Flock now?

To their credit, the Flock team have clearly realised the position they're in, and have tried to innovate once more. But in those same intervening two years, I've been busy myself, configuring Firefox just how I like it. Flock needed to have something really, really special to make me go to the effort of changing - and sad to say, it didn't.

Unless the forthcoming 'version 1.0' has something up its sleeve, Flock's greatest contribution in the long term may prove to be as a 'proof of concept', rather than an end-product in itself. We're seeing elements of its core ideas in new Firefox add-ons like the eBay companion and 'The Coop' for Facebook users. But if someone could detach some of Flock's slicker features (such as its blog-posting tool) and offer those as Firefox add-ons, I'd certainly be interested.

Tags: browser, delicious, facebook, firefox, flickr, flock, social networking, web 2.0

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Comments

1. At July 18, 2007 6:12 PM, Evan Hamilton wrote:

Hey Simon,

I'm sorry to see that Flock 0.9 has not engaged you (it has certainly engaged others, as you can see here: http://www.flock.com/node/11728). We have certainly had a long break from releases, but the team we have now is dedicated to (and already working on) regular and innovative releases (plural).

I think your suggestion about extensions achieving Flock functionality, while common in the space, is not entirely accurate. One of the primary reasons we created Flock (instead of a series of extensions) is the integration between the features. You can send articles directly from our RSS reader to our blog editor. You can drag'n'drop photos from our Mediabar to our Web Clipboard to use later. You don't get any extension conflict errors or extension-based slowdowns. Basic functionality could perhaps be mirrored in extensions, but that integration could not.

That said, Flock 0.9 is only the tip of the iceberg. We have several innovative additions planned for Flock even before we release our 1.0 later this year. I hope you will give us another look then.

Flock on,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

BT broadband office