Flock
October 21st 2005
Okay, everyone’s going to be talking about flock, but I’m jotting my thoughts down from my initial ten minutes of playing around with it.
First, love the blog integration, but how useful is it going to be to anyone except us early adopters and bloggers? Oh, wait, everyone blogs these days.
Second, pretty rough around the edges (some interface quirks here and there). It’s a beta, I’ll let it slide.
Third, I’m stuck with flickr?? Sorry, I want zenphoto integration. 
As a side note, how much did flickr pay flock? And del.icio.us?
Fourth, the favorites look good, but I haven’t used them enough to be useful.
Fifth, it seems too fake, and what I mean by that is Web 2.0 is arrogant, why can’t you realize that? It’s a “we’re better than everyone else and we know it” feel. It’s like
saying you’re cool because you hang out with the cool people. Let’s get real, folks. The web is not high school.
So screw the hyped apps, let’s have some real integration. I really want to see a browser so flexible that it exposes this kind of functionality with almost any web app, not just the cool kids—flickr, technorati and del.icio.us. Which leaves me wondering, should all this be in a browser anyway? Aren’t I limiting myself an awful lot here?
So I’m wondering if they got the whole idea wrong from the beginning. I’d feel awfully sorry for them if they did, so I’ll give it a chance and see if it does anything for me. After all, I do like this blog manager.
Update: Joel gets it too. I couldn’t agree more. Also, I’m updating this in Wordpress, and I can’t read the code the stupid Flock blog editor made. So much for that…
You’re absolutely right. Why make everything part of the browser, while everything can allready be done WITH the browser, all be it the ‘old fashioned’ way of loading the webpage(s) in your browser window. Sometimes I just don’t see the point..
I’ve played around with Flock for a little bit. I have to say that I think it might have promise but it certainly needs work. The blog editor, I think, is the most in need of some help of some kind. It’s very cool but why the heck does it have to insert markup? Why can’t it just take my text the way I write it? I’m used to writing using Textile. I’m used to writing
. I don’t want it converting my entities.Oh, and, like Firefox, it’s too slow for me. UI response time is noticeably slow. Maybe i’m an ass but, that’s what I think so far. However; I’ll give it some time and try to play around with it. More browsers has to be good somehow.
Yeah, your right, only I’m interested in a way to connect to more blogs than just WP, MT, and Blogger. You’re right about all the cool applications hanging out with all the other cool applications.
I came in looking for some ZenPhoto updates and saw this post. “What the hell is Flock,” I thought. I went off to the website to try and figure it out. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out what it was. That’s never stopped me from downloading software before, so I went for it.
I quickly discover Flock is a web browser and it’s based on Firefox. It seems to have some integration with del.icio.us and flickr. And a blog writer. Ho, hum. Wake me when there’s something cool.
Seriously – what does this do that I can’t already accomplish with Bookmarklets and Extensions? Sure, it’s got a pretty looking theme and a cool icon… I dunno, maybe I’m just not cool enough to “get it.”
Thanks for all your comments everyone. It’s nice to know there are still some real people around.
I really think I hit something by saying Web 2.0 is like a popularity contest. It’s not about building the best apps using a mix of the best technologies for the best user experience, it’s about somehow being “cool” in a very fake high-school sense, and using overly large Helvetica to announce it to the world.
Great post. Web 2.0 is becoming islands of functionality again. Except this time the islands are services like Flickr.
Real integration like you say would be an open API to plug all services into. Isn’t that the promise of XML based services? So far RSS is the only protocol that is living up to that.
The worst part is that this only makes the “cool kids” look “cooler”. If this browser gets some media attention soon, it will help boosting the hype over del.icio.us – which i think is a very crappy service – and flickr – which is awesome, there, I said it.