Flock: The Web 2.0 Browser Takes Off (Dion Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog)

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Flock: The Web 2.0 Browser Takes Off

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It has happened: Flock was released this afternoon (kudos to Michael Arrington for appearing to be the one to break the news). You can try the first ever "social browser" out right now if you want. Reportedly pumped full of Web 2.0-style social software mechanisms, the much anticipated Flock includes del.icio.us integration and in-browser blog posting as two of its key differentiating features. The real question on everyone's mind though is can Flock best the mighty FireFox, upon which it's fundamentally based?

Wondering that very question myself, I downloaded the Developer Preview of Flock this evening and took it for a pretty thorough spin and the results are decidely mixed. There's no question the whole Flock download and install experience has some nice attitude (the feedback form asks the right question, "Please list one or two things in Flock, that if changed, would make you a Flock user", and they do say that the preview "ain't for the faint of heart! If you're the bleeding-edge type and don't mind a few scrapes and busted knees from time to time, feel free to give it a whirl.") My experience wasn't particularly painful but it also didn't make me fly with the geese either.

But rather than give you a boring narration of my experience, I will tactfully cut right to the chase and tell you exactly what I found out in my test "flight":

Del.icio.us integration doesn't seem very social. Flock lets you manage your bookmarks with mostly seamless storage and retrieval of your bookmarks out on the Web using the del.icio.us APIs. But surprisingly for a social browser, Flock does not let you see what other folks have tagged with similar tags or provide any other way of socially sharing bookmark information, at least as far as I could tell (and boy did I try).
Fast, facilitated access to feeds on a web page This is one of the coolest features I ran across. Flock has an extremely clean and clear layout for views of RSS feeds. Load up a page that has a feed on it and a nice yellow feed button pops up and lets you switch to an elegant feed display that throws out all the clutter on a typical page and focuses on the feed's content.
Blog integration is competent. But certainly not mindblowing. There are preconfigured connections to some of the popular blog sites. However, I found the blog editor to be very rudimentary and somewhat buggy (particularly the cursor jumped all over the place unexpectedly).
A Shelf to keep stuff. Not well documented or explained, Flock provides a Shelf window upon which you can drag and drop any link you select on a web page. This actually seemed to work pretty well and was convenient for dropping things I wasn't sure I wanted to bother to bookmark and tag yet.
Slick access to history via search field. The Search box in the upper right corner has the nice feature of showing you matches in your recent history as you type and before you even trigger the search on the Web. Neat for quickly finding stuff in history.
Viewing tags is broken. While all my bookmarks and tags made it as far as del.icio.us, the tags were not visible inside the browser once set. I don't know about you but I absolutely depend on my del.icio.us tag cloud to find things. I'm using Windows, so maybe it's just broken there and certainly this will be fixed soon but this doesn't make Flock very useful at the moment.

And that's it so far. Unless I'm missing something (surely possible), it's pretty clear that Flock does not yet have enough heft to significantly differentiate it from Firefox. Certainly most or all of these capabilities could easily be obtained via the vast number of plug-ins and add-ons already available for Firefox. This has also been pointed out by another Web 2.0 Workgroup member today as well. Worse, I think expectations were set for folks to see some fairly revolutionary functionality that showed off some of the promise of full-strength Web 2.0 applications, which is not the case here.

Yet I'm entirely hesitant to condemn what they are doing because I personally can see the vast potential for what they could do. If they can make Flock truly social, rather than just adding some social push mechanisms within it, then they can offer a compelling experience. What exactly would this mean? How about, for starters:

Social Bookmarking Affinities: Dynamically show browsing users the bookmarks of pages similiar to the one they're looking at based on tag matches with other user's tags. Could be filtered or sorted by priority and hit ratio.
Blog a Browsing Session: Allow users to quickly select the last n Flock Stars in chronological order and send to your blog. Flock only lets you click on a link and select "Blog This", that's far too rudimentary. This publishes a nice link propagation of the good pages you just visited ("see the stuff I just ran across...")
Page Rating: Stars should accumulate a rating that is visible to all Flock users when they visit a page, like Google's Page Rank (unless you make your stars private of course).
Social "Awareness": See how many other Flock users have recently visited a site and perhaps even who is currently on the page you're viewing (optional of course). You could also use this to see what their recent bookmarks are, jump into IM with them, read their blogs, etc. This builds community and social networks and that's what the eponymous flock concept is all about IMHO.
Real Enrichment/Participation Mechanisms: Add page reviews, comments, etc. Allow easy navigation to see the pages with the largest number of reviews, the oldest pages with comments, etc. Perhaps even allows markup on pages that can be turned on. Maybe integrate with the WaybackMachine to see old versions of a page and old comments.

None of these ideas is technically very difficult though they may require more infrastructure than Flock is willing/able to tackle. And like I said in my post this morning, big Web 2.0 ideas require high concept, and that is ultimately what Flock is lacking at the moment.

As it stands now, I see no reason to leave Firefox just to obtain some minor del.icio.us connectivity and blog integration. Add some of the items in my second list above, and now you might just see me forced to drop FireFox so I can get at some real value provided by Web 2.0 approaches that I just can't get otherwise. Or see here in Flock today.

Technorati: web2.0, flock, socialsoftware

posted Thursday, 20 October 2005
links: del.icio.us

Don Harrison made this comment,

Microsoft and Internet Explorer sucks. Internet and the whole world has been held back by Bill Gates and Microsoft. Like BIG Brother I am sure they are monitoring all of this. I am sure that Microsoft will do its best to scupper Flocks success. Don

comment added :: 27th October 2005, 18:30 GMT-05

Mike made this comment,

Someone told me about this today and I had to admit, I hadn't actually heard of it. The semantic web, XML etc is something I have been meaning to look into for a while though. Now I am going to have to.

Mike

comment added :: 3rd November 2005, 02:43 GMT-05 :: http://www.undesign.co.uk

FewClues made this comment,

I didn't care all that much for Flock when I first downloaded and ran it.I made itself my primary browser without asking and I am a control freak. However as Web 2.0 has grown so has my interest in the participation. And now I'd be lost without Flock, del.icio.us and shawdows.com

I use a variety of computers and its nice to find my bookmarks and continue a research path from any of them. I now am a Flock advocate, as well as a WEBw.WSJ2 advocate!

comment added :: 16th April 2006, 18:21 GMT-05

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Flock off to a bloody impressive start
Excerpt: As far as new browsers go it’s difficult for me to get excited about them because there are so many out there but lately I’ve been impressed by two different browsers. First was Opera which went free after being a pay or ad-supported brow
Blog: Things That ... Make You Go Hmm
Date: Friday, 21 October 2005 04:08 PM

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email: dion (at) hinchcliffeandco (dot) com
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