I like Flock, the social web browser. The integration with blogs, photo-sharing and online bookmarking sites is really well done. And the design looks fantastic. Having a built-in RSS reader is a great bonus and miles ahead of Firefox’s Live Bookmarks or the weird and unintuitive use of feeds in Thunderbird or Opera. So am I moving from Firefox? No way.
Part of the problem is that I can emulate almost every feature of Flock with a Firefox extension that is considerably more mature than the social browser. Flock is still in beta one as I write. My Firefox extensions are all version three, or later. I have the del.cio.us extension for bookmarking. I have the Bloglines bookmarklets for RSS feeds as quick buttons on my toolbar, along with a dozen other websites and WordPress buttons. I have the Performancing extension for blogging (that one’s on trial, I have to admit, since it munged up the Fred Flintstone post a few days ago). I haven’t got anything to integrate photosharing, I’ll have admit, but since I store my photos rather than share them, that’s not really a big loss.
I guess my real issue with switching to Flock is that I don’t want to be locked into the services it has managed to integrate. If a better bookmarking site than del.iciou.us comes along and people move over, I want to go there instead. I’m already looking carefully at Blinklist (bookmarks) and NewsHutch (RSS). If I do choose to switch to them, then that’s two quite large parts of Flock that will have ceased to be at all useful.
This is the reason I think that Flock will have a hard time. The sort of person who downloads Flock is a neophiliac. They always want the latest, greatest services to work with. When Bookmarkolio 2.0 comes along with its swish logo and AJAXified transitions, the core Flock user is exactly the sort of person who is going to want to move all their bookmarks there. At that point, the gorgeous blue and gold star that handles bookmarks in Flock becomes a waste of space. Or worse still, you’ll end up forgetting and using it for half the time so that your bookmarks end up spread between two different services.
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Hey Ian,
We definitely don’t want to lock people into using any particular service. Unfortunately our development has been moving so fast during the alpha and beta stages of the product that we haven’t had stable API’s, but we’re hoping to have those for our 1.0 release later this year.
Admittedly, if you’ve got Firefox customized exactly the way you want through extensions and bookmarklets, then Flock may not be the right browser for you. We’re aiming the product beyond the tech crowd to the much larger group of people that are social online but may not want to spend much time or effort customizing their browser.
Cheers,
Will Pate
Community Ambassador, Flock
Hi Will. Thank you very much for responding. And notwithstanding my criticisms, I’d like to reaffirm my liking for the product. Very slick.
Will be really interested in hearing your strategy for reaching your markets, too. To me, it is the MySpace/bebo/FaceBook user that ought to be the #1 target for a product like Flock. And I can see that affiliate deals could really work for you there. Once it is a little more mature, of course.
One persons opinion on Flock, the new Social Web Browser. …
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