Slashdot Mirror
Flock, the New Browser on the Block
^tamago^ writes to tell us BusinessWeek Online is reporting that a new browser is stepping into the arena. This new competitor, Flock, hopes to change the face of web browsing by turning their's into the swiss army knife of browsers. From the article: "Flock's browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn't satisfied passively browsing media online. Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online"
Decrem expects to make money from running Google ads, as well as getting so-called affiliate fees for referring users to commercial sites such as Amazon.com (AMZN ). Moreover, he envisions getting money from other Web services, such as blogging or photo-sharing services, that might pay Flock for sign-ups sent their way from the Flock software.
Is it Opera all over again in terms of its business model?
Or does it sound like a legalized spyware?
What would site owners feel if a browser is competing for Google Ads and referral bonuses with them?
I signed up a while ago to get this browser, but I've heard nothing back since. Has it finally opened up to the public?
Some settling may occur during posting.
....Will be sheep?
Because the text on that page is GIGANTIC.
VOTE!
The site looks as if it was created by 5 yr olds... my email address..i dont think so. I have enough spam.
Karma: a simple way of silencing those with unpopular views regardless how correct or just that view might be.
First most obvious question to me is, will it run on Linux? No mention in the article, and their web site is coy (and a little annoying in its design). It does mention "cross platform tastiness", and "written in java", so I'm hoping.
That said, my biggest worry is browser extensions that start relying on non-standard implementation, i.e., they begin to have affinity for things not-html, not-javascript, things not-css. I know the browser universe is a hodge-podge of standards already, I just would hate to see yet another trailblazer that ends up to be some extension of some proprietary idea.
Anyway, to the new browser and its team, welcome to our flock. Best of luck.
Lots of wild promises, requires an invite, they can't develop a web page worth a crud, and their "extentions" page screams "FireFox". Me thinks that this isn't as ground breaking as their PR department will have you believe. We'll see, though.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Looks more like a phishing exercise:
Home About Download Extensions Flock has landed.We're introducing the world's most innovative social browsing experience. We call it the two-way web.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be seeding invites to a few lucky folks. Sign up to find out when invites are available:
Thanks for your interest!
Email: And no, we won't spam you, sell your address or do anything else but use this info to let you know when invites are available. We hate spam just as much as you!
Oh and hey, wanna join the flock? We're hiring! So guess what? Send us your resume!
Not to flame, but talk about one fugly website. I'm all for minimalism but it looks like some 3-year old barfed up html code.
Well, all I can say is that if the web site is any indicator of the design talents of its creators, I don't hold much hope for the "swiss army knife" of browsers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
i hear it has "push" technology
lose != loose
Decrem expects to make money from running Google ads, as well as getting so-called affiliate fees for referring users to commercial sites such as Amazon.com
feck flock
Wah Sig!
Instead of telling someone to visit a website, I can tell them to "Flock This!"
So it'll do everything but be good at nothing?
No thanks. I'll stick to the UNIX/LINUX strategy of Do One Thing. Do It Well.
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
Jack of all trades, master of none.
This is probably going to be a huge VB program that doesn't do anything very well.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
... Flock off!!
They have a site that I hope looks better in their browser and they require me an invite to join.
I can think of at least three other browsers I'd rather use thanks.
RTFA again for the best results.
Tell us when it really comes out.
I ran so far away.
I've heard rumors that it is based off of Konqueror. Since it seems that it cannot be downloaded at this time, can anyone who has used it comment on the validity of such rumors? If they are true, is it based on Konqueror itself, or does it just the KHTML rendering engine?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
A link to a story about a press release for a private beta. Stuff that matters? Not really. Wake me up when the browser is publically available.
A browser that embraces bloat!
can somebody, after having domainsquatted flockswap.com, post invites here? or do I have to buy em off ebay like last time..
I what proactive MBA envisioned the synergies that would allow flock to become a knowledge portal center of excellence for podcasting core competencies of leveraging mindshare and paradigm shifts to achieve superlinear ROI.
Expect Flock to crash and, from time to time, lose all your data.
OK, so apparently it's at least as stable as IE.
Even if it isn't nefarious, surely people are starting to realize that the more features you cram in, the less secure the application will be? The IE core isn't bad, it's all the features they put on top of it like ActiveX etc.
I've seen this feature before, but I can't recall where...
Throwing everything but the kitchen sink into your browser is always a good strategy. I mean, look at how well it worked with Netscape 4!
Yet another browser to optimise my web page for, and a lame one at that. No, thanks.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
methinks it may be a bit late to enter the browser market at this stage with so many well-established and user-tested browsers on the "free" market.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
If the name is any indicator, the makers of this new browser have a lot of hope that people will "flock" to it in droves.
Perhaps their mistake was in letting an 8-year-old kid create their website.
I can add bookmarks to delicious with their javascript bookmark. I can add links to images in my blog by just clicking a button. I can do everything else with a simple firefox extension. Or not if I don't want to. When they say they'll get affiliate fees through amazon do they mean they will add their affiliate tag everytime you go there?
Not enough information. Hopefully I'll get picked so I can try it out.
Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
The most innovative thing about Flock is that it's trying to do away with the notion of "browsing." ... Essentially, Flock's software is intended to serve less as a window into static Web content than as a customizable conduit for participatory Web services, from Flickr to del.icio.us to the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
Are they trying to turn browsing into browsing here? I think they may have overdone the alliteration, but I don't really understand what they're getting at. 'Browsing' the Internet is probably the best term here, even if it's not static content that is being browsed.
Besides, products that try to change or turn away the norm tend to not get very far - see Opera vs. Firefox and IE, or (more recently) disposable DVDs vs. normal ones.
I don't think this is going to get very far at all, even with the big limelight given to it by Slashdot here.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Go and click through on some of those extension links.
They ARE FireFox extensions. You can install them in FireFox today!
Which makes me wonder why they aren't making their "new features" as extensions to FireFox rather than claiming to be building a whole new browser.
It looks like it won't be doing anything in terms of functionality that a dedicated FireFox user couldn't get via extensions. That said, it doesn't look like it intends to compete on functionality. The name, page layout, and co-opting of GMail's invite viral marketing all make clear that they're going to go for broke on the presentation and marketing. Hey, it worked for the iPod--there are plenty of mp3 players out there with greater functionality, but people like how the iPod looks and will seek it out.
That said, people will pay through the nose for an mp3 player. Between M$'s bundling and the open-source movement, how exactly does a start-up web browser plan to make money? Honestly, if there's a niche in the market I would think it would be for ultra-secure browsers, not for flashy hip browsers.
"Someone somewhere had to wear pants for the first time. The meek and indecisive do not change our world." -Montville
http://beta.flock.com/user/signup no karma
When people are starting to be concerned about the security of their browsers doesn't a browser with a lot of options that have a default of on seem like a bad idea? Especially when they may or may not be used. (many people still don't fully use tabbing when given the option)
Firefox's extentions seem like the smart way to go all around.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Their site and logo is actually a direct rip off of 37signals. Everything from the dorky oversized fonts to the pastel colors and highlighting.
Even the logos! Flock's logo vs. 37signal's logo. Shameless.
Here's another example.
Flock vs. 37signals
Amazing.
Mozilaa doesn't want to sell me anything and it's a great browser and has a huge head start on these guys... I'll pass thank you. This sounds to me like an idea that the clueless were buying into about 8 years ago.
Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online.
And then you can open up the "blogging widget", the "photo sharing widget", the "FlogTunes widget"...
A dashboard, huh? Interesting...It'll be like the digital hub of 2005.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
That's an *impressively* obnoxious page design!
Everyone kept complaining, but I didn't believe it. Wow! They should win an award or something...
Maybe an award for "Most awful commercial example of minimalist website design".
Wow.
I'll grant it's readable...well, maybe light grey on white with yellow thrown into the mix is bad too. I hope they hire a graphic designer!
--LWM
It appears that their site fails to validate, at least according to the W3C Markup Validator.
k .com/home/
l la.orga .comu eror.org
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.floc
I would have expected the web page of a web browser to at least be standards-compliant. The Mozilla, Opera and Konqueror pages all validate cleanly:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.mozi
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.oper
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.konq
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Cowan notes that not everyone wants to trick out their Web browser. "Most people just want to drive their car off the lot," he says. So Flock's aim is to create software that makes it dead-easy for regular Web users to customize an experience with just a few clicks.
So, not everyone wants to customize their browser, so they're making the browser easier to customize?
Am I missing something here?
Or is this just a plan to trick some VC's into giving them money, so they won't have to get real jobs for a year? If so, hey, more power to them.
I wonder how they are going to do this. Are they going to convert requests such as "http://amazon.com" to "http://amazon.com?referalid=123323". This is just not right. It is not like the browser is refering amazon to the user.
Clearly, Google is the next Microsoft.
Since this is probably a GPL-derivative, I'd like the first to get an "invite" to stop all the "inviting" and simply post the source somewhere. Thx!
Fleur de Sel
To me it seems like a browser with a built in portal. What happens if your blog violates the terms of service? No more surfing for you?
Personally, I'd rather have seperate tools than one big web-a-majig anyway.
crazy dynamite monkey
... also... did you know that Flock will be Open Source ?
Kevin
I thought an application like that already existed. Called AOL.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
That's right... News for Nerds, and Stuff that matters, and now the coolest place to get corporate press releases and sponsered product reviews!
Wired states (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68823 ,00.html) that it's based off of Firefox. It is even developed by a member of the Mozilla Foundation. So perhaps a better question to ask would be, Is this browser meant to compete directly with Firefox and Seamonkey?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Check it out: www.flock.com
On the website there linking to firefox extensions. Is this just a firefox distribution with alot of bloat & spyware? How do they expect to compete against Firefox and IE with this? The reason why i prefer firefox above NS/Mozilla; NS/Moz is heavy, slow, bloat,...
Ok, so am I the only one who tried to sign up for a download? No, of course I didn't use my *real* email address. No one's that dumb (my apologies if you have suddenly become a member of the set of dumb people). I guess my "exclusive invite code" of "giveittomenow" just *happened* to be a valid code (I'm such a l33t h4x0r, eh?).
But then, shock of all horrors, it's the most defaultiest rails login app I've ever seen in production! Seems to me they could at least have changed some colors or added a logo (oh, right, they don't have a logo yet... or is it that blue rorschach?)
-Ant Slayer-
FLOCK(2) Linux Programmer's Manual FLOCK(2)
NAME
flock - apply or remove an advisory lock on an open file
SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/file.h>
int flock(int fd, int operation)
DESCRIPTION
Apply or remove an advisory lock on an open file. The
file is specified by fd. Valid operations are given
below:
LOCK_SH Shared lock. More than one process may
hold a shared lock for a given file at a
given time.
LOCK_EX Exclusive lock. Only one process may
hold an exclusive lock for a given file
at a given time.
LOCK_UN Unlock.
LOCK_NB Don't block when locking. May be speci­
fied (by or'ing) along with one of the
other operations.
A single file may not simultaneously have both shared and
exclusive locks.
A file is locked (i.e., the inode), not the file descrip­
tor. So, dup(2) and fork(2) do not create multiple
instances of a lock.
RETURN VALUE
On success, zero is returned. On error, -1 is returned,
and errno is set appropriately.
ERRORS
EWOULDBLOCK
The file is locked and the LOCK_NB flag was
selected.
CONFORMING TO
4.4BSD (the flock(2) call first appeared in 4.2BSD).
NOTES
flock(2) does not lock files over NFS. Use fcntl(2)
instead: that does work over NFS, given a sufficiently
recent version of Linux and a server which supports lock­
ing.
flock(2) and fcntl(2) locks have different semantics with
respect to forked processes and dup(2).
SEE ALSO
open(2), close(2), dup(2), execve(2), fcntl(2), fork(2),
lockf(3)
There are also locks.txt and mandatory.txt in
/usr/src/linux/Documentation.
Linux 1998-12-11 FLOCK(2)
you can read more, and take a look at a (very small) screenshot, here:- browsing-is-cool/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/08/26/flock-social
I am actually sympathetic to the basic idea here: New platform.
I'm newly skeptical of the approach of endlessly creating side-systems on the web browser.
There are amazing things that are possible when you make a new platform for integrating ideas.
For example, we can envision a world where you can watch people writing blog posts as they write them. We can imagine working on documents together with others in real-time. We can imagine social networks, we can imagine shared web browsing. We can imagine going to a web page, and seeing other people who happen to be browsing the web page at the same time as well. We can imagine looking at them, seeing what their affiliations are; There are all these things. We have seen voice communication. Within 10 years, good voice synthesis will be coupled, and we'll be able to look and sound like anybody.
Now, what we haven't seen, even in our imaginations, is all this stuff working together. Integrated into one platform.
Doing this stuff piece-meal, a little bit at a time, on the edge of the network, isn't going to work. It's just not. It'd take forever. Building new standards into the existing network just takes forever. There is no design team. Nadah. Nothing.
Where we see the cool stuff happening, really, is in these large behemeouth new platform.
Now, sure, we can get some milage out of AJAX. We can do sophisticated things with that.
But are we really going to make a 3D world with live document editing, voice & synthesis, presence, infinite versioning on everything, avatars, the whole thing, yadda yadda yadda, using just AJAX? Within 10-15 years? Hell no! It takes at least at least 5 years to make a new specification pretty much standard amongst users. Even RSS aggregators have only 10% penetration amongst blog readers.
What does this mean? It means that a new platform is in the works. Whether you know it or not, a new platform is in the works. Which of the new upstarts is going to be it, remains to be seen.
Sure, sure, sure-- there will be gateways between the world of Vanilla HTML + AJAX into these new worlds.
At some point, you can make a computer render pictures of the new world, and ship them off in AJAX. You can even play Lemmings in the browser now. (Well, you could have...) But the new world is going to be built in the new world. It's not going to be built piecemeal out here in weblandia. When we use browsers to access it, it will be a window into that world, but it will not be that world.
The efficacy of "invite" based marketing is very interesting. Certainly it worked like gangbusters for GMail and for various social networking sites (eg facebook). In a less formal way, for IM clients like ICQ and AIM as well. I think that the common denominator is social interaction. Perhaps that's why they are spouting off about being a social browser that allows better blogging, posting, trolling, flamebaiting, etc. The blogs and forums could be a path to market share.
I also think that social "invite" marketing works much better for free services like e-mail, IM, and web browsing. MCI ran into a bit of a backlash with their aggressive Friends and Family marketing, because it resulted in people pressuring friends and family who were by definition long-distance into subscribing to a commercial phone plan that may not have been a good fit. Then again, Verizon seems to be doing pretty well with its In Plan. Of course, neither of those have the exclusivity element that GMail did initially and that Flock seems to be going for--but realistically, it's not all that exclusive if you can just go to a web site and sign up.
I think Flock looks weak for a number of reasons--ideally Google will buy it out, but outside of the founders and VC's fantasies it seems clear it will die an also-ran. But is invite marketing here to stay? Should it be?
"Someone somewhere had to wear pants for the first time. The meek and indecisive do not change our world." -Montville
Impressive, that one's quite rare.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
This Christmas, give something meaningful. Give the gift of GOAT to a needy family.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
AJAX is only such a hot topic because it's a clever new programming scheme that lets us overcome the horrible, decades-old limitations imposed upon us by the web's origins.
The idea of a request/response transaction model may have been cool when people wanted to access relatively static documents or document structures, but the cobwebs on such an architecture are readily apparent. Remember when people thought how cool CGI was because you could do dynamic things such as insert the current time into a document? We're far beyond those modest requirements in terms of usable and functional expectations.
Web services has taken the proper step forward by providing us with a decentralized mechanism for exchanging data; now, we need a presentation component to keep the pace.
In all seriousness, though, it's a bunch of FireFox developers who're whacking FireFox into a new form.
Is this offshoot officially associated with the Mozilla Foundation/Mozilla Corporation in any way, like Firefox itself is?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Does it run on GNU/Linux?
change the face of web browsing by turning their's into the swiss army knife
Important document:
http://tinyurl.com/3s4hx
...So..basically this thing wants to be the MS Bob of the new millenium?
Firefox is Flocked.
Sounds not only difficult, but dangerous.
Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online".
Well, shoot, that's great! I can't do any of that with Internet Explorer, Safari, Mozilla, or Firefox! I can't wait to see what I've been missing.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Where are these folks..umm err flocks?
Scott McNealy to Michael: "Suck my Sun!" Michael Dell to Scott : "Lick my Dell!"
Crock.
I smell imminent, blatant MPL infringement--unless, they are writing their own code to interpret the xpis (and perhaps ActiveX too, if they want some bizarre sort of extra credit or something).
If they do use Mozilla code, certainly they should have the source code available, as per the MPL, Section 3.6, no? Unless Flock has balls of Fire-proof steel and considers such a license naïve and unconstitutional like SCO or something...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Website no longer opens. Not a good start
http://web.archive.org/web/20040924022505/http://w ww.flock.com/
That slocks.
Not from what I've read. The founder, Bart Decrem, was in charge of marketing and business activities for the Mozilla Foundation. (So sayeth his bio, anyway.) But it seems like they're taking advantage of all the work that went into making it easier to rebrand FireFox earlier this year, and just making a totally new and unrelated browser that happens to share the same core technologies.
In researching that last paragraph, I came across this blog entry by one of the developers, which has a nice summary of press/blogger reactions to Flock.
- "I'll probably get modded down for this."
The even have href="mailto:contact@flock.com" right on their index page.
Totally clueless losers.
Oh well, what the hell...
I guess I'm weird. I want applications that do one job, one job only, and does it damned good. I don't want applications that attempt to do everything, but in the process doesn't do anything as well as it could if it were more focused. Do-it-all applications tend to be jack of all trades, but master of none.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
At least flock has a nice name... oh wait.. flock..oh i thought it was Pikachu sorry
I'm not sure I agree. The directions for subscribing "root@localhost.localdomain" to their mailing list a few times were clear enough.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
According to their download page "[You can] [e]xpect Flock to crash and, from time to time, lose all your data. ... And things will never be the same."
There is no god but Google and GTalk is the messenger of Google.
"Flock's browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn't satisfied passively browsing media online. Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online" DEAR FLOCK, meet firefox extensions.
Maybe it's just to deal with the /. crowd, but since the story first went up and my checking again a minute ago to show a friend, the flock website seems to have lost all of it's extra pages (Home, About, Download, Extensions, etc...) and the mainpage has a different statement but retains the email gathering box... Did anyone else notice the change?
Between the oversized font, simplistic layout, and lack of anything other than email gathering, it's very difficult to take them seriously... and even harder to understand how they were taken seriously enough to get any press coverage, even if only online.
What a flocking waste of time...
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
From the site blog:
Sigh. Yep. Tell them that. It's "a dashboard for collaborating". That'll convince those non-computer-savvy neighbors! Let's see what Aunt Gert thinks:
Why do geeks simply never say "It's a way to work together with your friends over the Web!" Why do we have to use nonsense words like "dashboard" and "collaboration" when there are perfectly lovely plain English substitutes?
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
always post about something that isn't out yet so that the entire discussion is not reviews but reduced to mindless arguments and speculation? Just let me know when the damn thing is released
...a Beowulf cluster flock.
Flock's browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn't satisfied passively browsing media online.
Shit, I'm not hip anymore.
mstyne: real name, no gimmicks
Well thank God we can finally text; and even talk to each other over the Internet. It's about bloody time. Why didn't someone think of this sooner?
KFG
wait wait wait, wtf is this:
What's more, the folks at Mozilla, the newly for-profit producer of Firefox, are still cranking away at making their software the browser of choice.
mozilla is for-profit now? whaaa-? when did this shit happen? or is this just an example of bad reporting?
education
That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
~a.bierce
For example, we can envision a world where you can watch people writing blog posts as they write them.
Why would we want to do that?
Want the online culture this Flock offers ?? Oh yeah, I'll stay with immenently configurable Firefox TYVM
It's like the "Swiss Army Knife" nature of Konqueror, or Firefox....only annoying and full of adware.
What an innovation!
..."We started Flock to build tools that empower people."
I don't want my browser to "empower" me, I want it to quickly and efficiently let me waste time between classes while reading about computers and things that explode. The thought of an "empowered" browser (and my experiences at a local women's college) brings up some very disturbing mental images.
Flock: You seem to be searching for pornography, which subjugates women and furthers the phallusocracy that keeps undeserving white men in power. Instead, I've directed your search towards some Andrea Dworkin you might want to peruse.
Flock: Your search for 'Black Norwegian Metal' returned 217,000 hits. But might I suggest some Natalie Merchant, Bikini Kill, Ani DiFranco, or other womyn-friendly artists?
Flock: I notice that your Slashdot history shows a disturbing number of posts that suggest discrimination towards homosexuals, people of African descent, and extraplanetary immigrants. Until you show a pattern of clicking and browsing of sites that further the cause of disenfranchised peoples of color or alternate sexuality, I will encrypt your "special" folder that you think I don't know about.
And I bet it smells like patchouli, too.
I have the song in stuck my head now, "What the world needs now, is another web browser, like I need a hole in my head"
In seriousness, though, perhaps the is the start of the much heralded extenability of mozilla-based product. Let the web browser select the media, but then create an appropriate interface based on media (i.e. the example they give, is an editor for blogs). I don't think it's a *new* idea, but rather an someone finally implementing an idea that's been around for a bit.
Why aren't more people using imeem? It's been around for almost a year quietly doing all of this.
Build a bittorrent client into the browser that is intelligent, azureus-esquely configurable, and that can resume downloads effortlessly (as opposed to having to manually reopen .torrent files) after program shutdowns, and I'll probably switch to it. ;-)
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
In short, it's:
Read the review for more.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
lamest post ever. Offers no insight or new ideas, just rehashes the same bullshit buzz-word filled platitudes that just about every software marketeer throws out there when they think they've "invented" something new.
>> swiss army knife of browsers
Swiss army knives have great portability and lousy tools. I think I'll stick with a browser that's made only for browsing, thanks.
LionKimbro, you are a dumbass.
Crazy internet business models! Aeron chairs! An office pet! Gallons of caffeine! It's like the mid-90's all over again!
Party Time: Excellent
Is it just me, or is everyone getting those pilcrow paragraph mark characters?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Welcome to 2015.
You log onto the Internet. (Ha, ha! Scratch that.) You're on the Internet, as always. All cities are wired all the time, and there's hardly a device that doesn't speak with the net. Today's cell phones are as laughable as 9600 baud modems are today. New cell phones are capable of creating 3D models and textures from items- it's the most popular way of "uploading" physical artifacts into the 3D virtual world.
You have a moment, and are interested in seeing what your friends are up to. Vinnie's browsing the web, researching some papers on post-modern something-or-other. Minipi is reading a paper for his information architecture classes. Mattis in Germany is looking at some music band sites. You can see them transparently live, even though they are all over the planet.
You go up to the music band sites and see that not just Mattis is working on it, but others are as well. You strike up a conversation with Mattis about the music. (With your voice.) The other people nearby may listen in, they may not- they may instead opt to just read the speech-to-text'ed transcript which passively rolls by in the background.
Joel wants to know how I'm doing, he goes checks it out. He sees me talking with Mattis; He's not particularly interested in the conversation, so he won't butt in or knock on the door; Instead, he just slips me an instant message letting me know he's nearby. Mattis notices my pause, and sees that I've received a note. "Oh, sorry, Mattis, something really important just came up." I talk with Joel.
Joel is working on a paper, and I see where it is, mid-writing. He's working on it with another fellow, in real-time. He needs some expertise of mine for this particular part; Something important to me, and that he knew that, and wants my input on it. I read it over, make some edits. "Hmm," his friend says, and proposes some other changes. We talk about it. We notice that there are 5 shadow people, watching as we right. Some people are very interested in Joel's thoughts; They're having a conversation about what he's writing on the permiter.
The basic idea here is that we're going to enter the "World Live Web." It turns out that it's rather useful to see and be seen. There are tremendous things that are possible by networking people, and that means live interaction. Deferring communications all the time is interesting, but has some problems, especially in terms of mass organizing. One thing we will see are regularly scheduled "time windows." It'll be a temporal hangout. Like a meeting or appointment, but not necessarily as formal.
Now, if you want to play "invisible" and be a voyeur, then fine. If you don't want people to see you while you're writing, be my guest. You can be one of "the invisible people."
But a lot of us, we're going to participate in this new world.
If done well, I'd find this useful. Using a 'history' as it exists now in firefox/ie isn't terribly helpful. Giving me a quick search through previous items, thumbnails of what pages looked like when I went there, etc. I'm not new in thinking of these - I know I've read or discussed these and other ideas with other people, but have yet to see them in any current modern browsers. Am I missing something obvious?
creation science book
I'm wondering whether the writer actually saw Flock in action, or just got really excited about all their market speak.
Um, except I'm not selling you anything?
And: I'm a Free Software developer?
Do you have any questions? What kinds of insights are you looking for?
What kinds of things are you interested in doing online? Perhaps I can help you.
For example, we can envision a world where you can watch people writing blog posts as they write them.
... "he's started a new paragraph..." ... "woot, is he talking about Microsoft yet?" ... "nah, it's something about his kid." ... "screw this, I'm gonna see what Dvorak's up to."
And for real thrills, you can watch paint dry.
You have to hand it to him though - he has the Slashdot userid 200000 and he always manages to get posts ending in 2 and a number of zeros...! AMAZING!
Almost as amazing as his new world. Speaking of which, what's going on with Open Croquet? There's your new world mr 200000!
:wq!
Yaaaawwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn ... what? ... that noise must be the sound of one hand clapping.
This is Slashdot, right? How is it that people don't know who Bart Decrem is?
No, actually, I know about Croquet. And I've run Squeak.
My memory tells me though, you can't work on source-code in real-time with others on Croquet, though. They don't have a gobby, they don't have a real-time voice system. They don't have all these things that people need.
It's a great system though, and it's great inspiration for the kinds of things we will do in the future.
BTW, the present existance of a thing doesn't mean we've entered a "new world" yet. I'll call it the "new world" when most everybody I know, and hoards I don't, are involved in that environment. The world wide web is a "new world" in this respect, compared to the past.
Earnestly, I don't understand the biting criticism to my post. I think it's just applied misanthropy. i.e.: "Oh God, bloggers are the sux0rs." What they don't realize is that they themselves are bloggers, whether they do it online, or whether they do it offline by just posting updates to their friends. In which case it's worse than general mis-anthropy, it's just general self-hatred. Not a good thing.
What's wrong with the post?
Perhaps it's not worded plainly enough: Interaction on the "web" will be live, sort of like being in a MUD or VR or MMORPG.
Now, if you don't want to be on the web that way, fine. But I'm betting you will.
Nobody goes to a disco wearing an invisibility suit, and nobody wants to go to a disco in an invisibility suit.
Now, the particulars of my post are for people who know the technologies I'm talking about, and understand the development hurdles. If that's not you, fine.
For you, just understand: There's going to be a live web in the future, and you're going to see what people are doing, in real time, whether that's writing, browsing, talking, whatever. Real-time.
... all of these new projects are using the relative success of the Gmail invitation-only beta, and its to the point where people assume that having invite-only will make the project more popular and/or desirable. All it really seems to do with most projects is frustrate potentially useful beta testers who can't access the downloads to try the damn thing out.
... software tests you!"
And I have to say, their website reminds me of eBay pages made by Hong Kong sellers - huge loud text, annoyingly painful to try to read. I wouldn't be surprised if their Slashdot exposure came to nothing because the website scares people off. Good luck on getting beta testers Flock!
Obligatory:
1) Create invite-only beta
2) Get Slashdot coverage
3) ???
4) Profit!
And where would we be without:
"In Soviet Russia
[/me hides from negative mod-points]
Will I try it when there is a PUBLIC beta? Or better yet, will I bother following a project with such an offensive front page? Yeah, right...
I swear we should be allowed to give mod points to sigs... "-1, Offtopic"
Sounds like you have entirely too much time on your hands and take far too much interest in looking over people's shoulders out of your own personal boredom. When I want to catch up with my friends I write an e-mail/call on the telephone or they do the same. If we're not calling or writing to each other that means we're busy with something and don't really want to be bothered.
What you've described is IRC chatrooms with expanded capability. I think we're all familiar with how much those have increased the value of life for the population. Can you take a trip to the authoritarian side of the street and write about how bored rich people (and bored retired people) will use this to harass productive citizens for their own personal amusement?
Screenshot of Flock 0.2
Apparently Flock also has a Digg-style service on their site.
You can check it out by signing up or by using the following account info to login:
username: slashdot
password: slashdot
Here are two screenshots of above mentioned Digg-style service that they call "Breadcrumbs."
Flock off.
Now wash your hands.
The nerds have spoken: I declare the design to be an unqualified success.
Honestly, I thought the look was refreshing and interesting. It's basically a flyer, after all. If you saw that printed on paper you wouldn't think twice about the design. Of course, web and paper design are not directly comparable, but for typography they are, and I see nothing wrong with their design.
But of course, it does not incorporate tiny aliased fonts, set in yellow on a transparent window alphablended over some tentacle porn. Also, it is insufficiently full of knicknacky doodads like silly polls, slashboxes, rss feeds, sci-fi-themed icons (that Bill Gates borg never gets old!) widgetry, countless superflouos hyperlinks and useless redundant headers. And it doesn't begin to compare to the timeless beauty that is X11.
Spare me.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
It looks like those crappy websites that every family put up when the Internet first started to spread into homes in the mid-90s. All that's missing is animated GIFs and blinking text to make this very bad web page into the worst.
Mozilla's has a simple layout, nothing spectacular, and I consider that a pretty good layout. This is just amateurish.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I disagree - there is a world of difference between this design and the crap on GeoCities, and if you can't see that then I don't know what to tell you. It's your opinion, feel free to hate it, but if you can tell me what is wrong with the type or layout, I'm curious to hear it. There are rules for design and typography, believe it or not. Big fonts does not equal bad type.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
actually, they spend all their budget on making their server slashdot-proof.
I am unique, just like you, and you, and you...
RE: Point 3
I just gave them a throwaway email. I own my own domain so I can create and kill emails at whim but you can do the same thing with the copious webmail services out there. I have one address that lives for only a year. Come January 1st if Flock is just a spammer in disguise the issue will be moot.
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
But for true obscurity, go back a few more years to find "The Flock" and their album "Dinosaur Swamp"
No DOCTYPE, since I want the tables which I use for some of the layout to look the same in legacy browsers (e.g. Netscape) as it does in modern browsers.
Netscape 8 is not a "legacy browser". If you're talking about Netscape 4, on the other hand, a lot of the quirks of "legacy browsers" can be emulated by playing with the vertical-align and other attributes in the style sheet. You can hide the style sheet from Netscape 4 by using @import inside a <style> element instead of a <link> element.
TD in a table without a TR, since putting the TR in the table makes the page look worse in Lynx (it causes the last line in a table to indent)
If you're not making a rows-and-columns table, then should you really be using tables instead of CSS? And isn't Netscape 4 such a minority that you can serve a simplistic layout to its users (that is, one without a lot of CSS, looking almost like the HTML 2 days) and few people will complain?
http://static.flickr.com/21/31057629_7f05bd1be6.jp g?v=0
No kidding! That was the first time a website actually startled me.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
For example, when rogaine first aired commercials in the US, it advertised itself as 'rogaine with monoxodil' as some product to turn your life around, but instead of people asking where to sign up, everyone called to ask 'what the fuck is it?'
That's called a reminder ad. The Food and Drug Administration puts strict limits on what can be said in a commercial for a prescription medication. If you name a condition and a medication in an advertisement within the United States, you also have to name the medication's side effects, and until August 1997 when FDA regulations were clarified to suggest that the drug maker say for example "See our ad in Fitness magazine", you had to name so many that you couldn't fit them all in even a 60 second TV spot. Even now, you can't fit the required "major statement" of the most important risks of a drug into the 15-second format. Thus, 15-second drug commercials on TV are either of the "reminder" format or the "help-seeking" format, which involves naming a condition and specifying that you can learn more at a given web site, by calling a given telephone number to have a brochure mailed to your home, or by talking to your physician.
You mean watching a raft of "group" activities online .... okay, count me in.
----------------------
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx
line 2 column 1 - Warning: missing declaration
line 8 column 356 - Warning: ' is not approved by W3C
line 10 column 2403 - Warning: missing before
line 10 column 2435 - Warning: inserting implicit
line 10 column 2547 - Warning: discarding unexpected
line 12 column 46 - Error: is not recognized!
line 12 column 46 - Warning: discarding unexpected
line 14 column 980 - Warning: discarding unexpected
line 24 column 6844 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 6997 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7004 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7166 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7173 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7423 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7574 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7581 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7729 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7736 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 8210 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 6 column 115 - Warning: inserting "type" attribute
line 8 column 381 - Warning: inserting "type" attribute
line 8 column 449 - Warning: inserting "type" attribute
line 10 column 58 - Warning: proprietary attribute "topmargin"
line 10 column 58 - Warning: proprietary attribute "leftmargin"
line 10 column 58 - Warning: proprietary attribute "marginwidth"
line 10 column 58 - Warning: proprietary attribute "marginheight"
line 10 column 289 - Warning: proprietary attribute "height"
line 10 column 938 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 938 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 1230 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 1230 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 1423 - Warning: proprietary attribute "height"
line 10 column 1570 - Warning: attribute "bgcolor" had invalid value "FFFFFF" and has been replaced
line 10 column 1612 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 1612 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 2554 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 2554 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 3339 - Warning: proprietary attribute "height"
line 10 column 3460 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 3460 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 3761 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 3761 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 4066 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 4066 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 4363 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 4363 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 4672 - Warning:
proprietary attribute "url"
line 10 column 4818 - Warning:
proprietary attribute "menu"
line 10 column 5121 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 5121 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 5258 - Warning:
proprietary attribute "menu"
line 10 column 5561 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 5561 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 5706 - Warning:
proprietary attribute "menu"
line 10 column 6009 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 6009 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 6144 - Warning:
proprietary attribute "menu"
line 10 column 6447 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 6447 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 6578 - Warning:
proprietary attribute "menu"
line 10 column 6881 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 c
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
flock is a library call, not a binary in the filesystem.
A lot of C library calls on BSD, Linux, and UNIX systems have wrapper programs so that they can be used by shell scripts: man 1 flock
Welcome to 2015.
And good-bye. Your computer is not "trusted", and neither of the ISPs in town will let you connect.
Sounds like a good browser and everything, but will it run on GNU HURD?
I actually welcome the influx of thicker browsers, that have more content related features. The best one recently being Comic Junkie, which aggregates webcomics, giving new posting alerts, tracking which ones you've read, and displaying the webcomics in a rich web browser with thumbnails, ratings, comments and social bookmarking.
Here's the link: http://www.comicjunkie.com
I hope these flock guys take a look and a richer browsing experience for these niche web markets.
Oh no my dear boy, it's much worse.
. There are two kinds of sweetbreads: stomach sweetbreads (also known as heart or belly sweetbreads), which are an animal's pancreas, and neck (AKA throat or gullet) sweetbreads, an animal's thymus gland. (The animal in question can be a hog or calf or just about any other large mammal, I gather.) They're called sweetbreads for the obvious reason that if you called them thymus glands or whatever you couldn't give the damn things away. The art of euphemism goes back a long way.
Posted on Slashdot a few months ago? I do remember this site and I think I had visited it some time ago because of Slashdot.
Their website sucks major ass! After browsing around it, I am still no furthur in understanding what's so special about this flock or what it looks like or where I can download it. Seems like just some kind of scam to me. Moving along...
Meh.
This is already out with over 211,800,000 users. It's called StumbleUpon, a social extension for Firefox and IE.
/.'s entry as an example and if you want to add your own blog entry/comment you can.
Visit a web page, rate it as good or bad, read other peoples comments Here's
Right clicking a web image adds it to your blog along with your comment.
Over time the ratings you give sites allows StumbleUpon to suggest sites and even other people that might interest you.
Oh, and it also keeps a history of sites you have visited - but more importantly allows you to see those sites you rated good.
So, meh, it's been done - properly - as an extension to Firefox/IE and not as a completely new browser with all the maintenance issues that entails.
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina
ByzantineOS does a good job of being a 'internet dashboard', all from a bootable CD/flash drive, running Mozilla.
Video Production Support
TechCrunch (a Web 2.0 blog) has done a couple profiles on Flock. Check them out if you want more details on the product.
reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online"
Who wants anything to do with a raft that has caught fire?
Registered Linux User #404114 [url=http://www.punkoiska.com][img]http://img406.imageshack.us/img406/4379/posbannercf5.g
Read: Shit Sandwich
A+++++++++++++++ Would use browser again!
by turning their's into the swiss army knife of browsers
"their's" is not a real word - should be "theirs"
So it'll be just like Firefox with all the plugins and extensions installed for me, so I can't pick and choose?
You've got it all wrong. Flock was designed by 8 year-old Bobby Williams so his disabled grandmother could use the friggin computer. She's legally blind so the type had to be ridiculously huge, and the site had to be crappy because he's an 8 year-old, not a team of professional web designers!
I would.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Judging from the comments, Flock is deader than disco, and it hasn't even been released, yet. It has been bludgeoned to death by Slashdot readers, most of whom are probably loyal Firefox users and know a knock-off when they see one. So, of course, they decided to advertise *here*. With a webpage that looks thrown together in five minutes. Can anybody tell me, when you're marketing a new browser, what mistakes should you not make? Show of hands? Ah, yes, you....
failure.
Will these people never learn?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Well, we just had a story on /. the other day where Linus said he didn't like specs which do the same thing as standards. The so-called troll post makes a very good point. Just b/c he's pointing out the hypocrisy of the /. crowd he gets modded as troll. Shameful.
Actually, it's a reference to a character I played in a production of "Frantic Family Vacation" back in 1998.
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
The founder and CEO of Flock is the very same Bart Decrem who co-founded Eazel, the company who gave us Nautilus. He also helped found the GNOME Foundation and used to handle business affairs for the Mozilla Foundation! Check out his bio.
You know, Microsoft's street address also says a lot about their mentality.
Why not? As far as I'm concerned it's the only way to reliably show a real friggin apostrophe!
(Not a Minute symbol, which is what you get when you hit that key to the right of the ; key)
Proper uses:
Longitude 94 15' 23" W <- The key on the keyboard
Fascinating--on Preview, I found out that Slashcode filters convert entity 146 into a minute symbol ( ' ). What the heck is the point of that? Also, it removes entities 8220 and 8221, which are proper double quotes.
Can't, won't you're <- I used entity 146
The quick brown fox said, You're full of crap! <- I used entities 8220, 8221
Well, I would prefer straight quotes (minute symbol) over ’, which only exists (or should exist) in a windows character set. The UTF value for the apostrophe is 8217, and that's what they should be using.
Although, using ' is way better than having the actual ASCII-coded value of 146, but it still seemed a bit odd.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
You know, this conversation is really dumb. It's some kind of warped idea pissing match, and I'm not interested in participating anymore.
I think the idea of holding back a text until it's done is interesting and good. I've seen it before. I'm not convinced that I wouldn't like to see text as it's being written, or at least to have the option to see it as it's written.
I'll tell you why.
One day, I was writing a post for the communitywiki. A friend of mine sent me a Skype message; He was just curious about what I was up to, what I was thinking about, how I was doing. I texted back to him: "Well, actually, I'm working on a post you might be interest in." We agreed to open up a gobby session, and I copied and pasted my text into it. I continued writing my post, him looking over my shoulder.
I wrote something poorly, and he asked a question about it: "What do you mean by xyz?" He and I talked a bit in Skype IM, and then I realized the text was unclear. We talked about how to fix it, and then put the fix in place.
While I worked on the text below, I noticed that every now and then, he'd fix a spelling error he'd noticed. He'd also point an arrow and say, "What is this?" or "I don't think I agree here..." Things like that.
It was a good interaction. The classical problem with writing is that you can't get your audiences response to the writing in real time. This problem is now solved. It is rare in the material world that we are physically present with people who will be reading it at the same time. In the online world, this is actually easier to do; Place in the world doesn't matter so much.
There were some problems with the interaction though: It took entirely too long to negotiate gobby to make this a regular thing.
In most of our IRC meetings, we'd like to keep some schematic notes, and a record of the meeting. This requires that we negotiate a transfer to using a whiteboarding app (such as the Coccinella on the Jabber networks,) or to using gobby. There are problems such as so-and-so doesn't have Foo installed, or Bar installed, or whatever. And then there's the time it takes to get a group of people on the same page. Then there's the problem that the people who aren't around when we negotiate a transfer are "abandoned" - when we're talking in gobby, the folk in #onebigsoup on IRC don't see our words.
This is a problem because most of the time, the way we manage to get together and talk together is that 2 people happen to be around and make a conversation, and then later the other members notice that there is activity on the channel, and then tune in to see if they are interested. (I have a general strategy for improving with this kind of conversational tinderwood, I call it "OverHear." If you should happen to think it's a stupid idea, please don't let me know.)
Anyways- when we go into gobby, the "conversational tinderwood" is gone. The other members of the forum would be interested in what was going on, but they simply don't know about it, because they didn't happen to be there when the conversation was happening.
Now, it is of course possible to establish bridges, connectors, link-ups between forums. But in my experience they tend to be "hacky," made available pretty late; For some reason, the bridges just don't seem to work very well. This feeds into my newly revived "platformist" approach (rather than "side-system" approach) to the development of communication systems. The ability to generically extend a given system is always a good thing, but there are things that a given platform is just genuinely not good at. It reaches a fundamental limit, a breaking point. And I think that the world wide web as a platform is sort of reaching that platau point. I can forsee that the webapps on the world wide web are going to continue to grow in capabilities and strenghts. But I think th
I'm not convinced that I wouldn't like to see text as it's being written, or at least to have the option to see it as it's written.
I've already said there's nothing wrong with having that option, and suggested a way you could implement that option without having to install specific software on everyone's computer.
All I'm saying is that I've watched this cycle play out on top of various technologies over the years, and there's these two things that always happen.
1. You get some people who insist on only using it, so if you're dealing with them you don't have an option... you HAVE to be in real time. These ar the same people who send yuo email saying they're going to call you on the phone, and call 3 meetings to get an answer they could have got in one email. Which is incredibly disheartening if it's your boss.
2. After a while, people give up on using special software to do stuff.
Implementing this as some kind of Javascript-based tool, and you'll get somewhere, without creating another application that I have to use to interact with these "special" people.
Anyways- when we go into gobby, the "conversational tinderwood" is gone.
That's because you *go into* it. You're not using it along with your existing IRC. I don't know why, I don't know what aspectes of the interface make IRC undesirable as a part of the tool, but that's something you need to solve.
I think that somewhere around 2010-2015, we're going to see a new platform take over.
The new platform will support both 3-D & 2-D. It'll have online activity awareness (you'll be able to see what people are doing, where they are in the various spaces.) It'll be live (real-time) and lively (fun,) for most people.
I think that you're going to see more 3d user interfaces, definitely. But I don't think they're going to change the default situation whereby unless you explicitly choose to enter an interactive space people do not see you and do not know what yuo're doing any more than they do now. At the very least, if they do it will turn into a disaster.
Many people believe that we don't need to perform any additional work
This is why we're not communicating. I keep saying "this is how you can do something to make what you want happen", and you keep hearing "we don't have to make anything new". While you're the one who;s sitting there refusing to try and actually do something rather than fantasising about this super cyberspace of the future.
It's not that the task is difficult (it is not,) it's that it is an interruption. Specifically, it can take about 45-120 seconds to do so. All conversation must stop, while everyone calibrates their getup to the new environment.
If you do it the way I'm suggesting, it will take then 10 seconds at the most, if their computer's really slow, to click on the link to *the specific page* that you dropped into the channel and bring up the shared whitebord.
Dropping links into channel doesn't interrupt anyone. You click on the link, the browser window opens, and even if you have to wait you don't have to EVER stop communicating on channel.
If you have some idea about how to improve the system, or have some idea about how to implement it, or if you have some other constructive idea, I'd like to hear it.
Then quit reading what you want to read into what I'm saying, and pay attention to what I'm actually saying, because I've been doing that. And quit complaining about *my* tone if you're not willing to listen to the way you're presenting yourself. You did it again in this message, telling me that if I don't like *your* idea I'm some kind of fossil.
I'm saying: I don't think all these side-systems are going to work. They're not going to integrate. Somebody or some group in the next 10 years is going to make some system that does integrate all these systems into one cohesive whole, and it's going to work great, and everyone's going to want to build on it.
We already have some of these systems, let me list them:
These are all platforms. They all did something that the existing platforms didn't cover well enough. Theoretically, IRC could happen entirely over the web. Theoretically. Only some people actually do it that way, though. Freenode runs entirely over an IRC server, and most people run IRC clients to use it.
The web is not the end of all things, whatever the REST people would have you believe. There will be new platforms. Special platforms, even, just like the web was originally. Remember having to download web browsers?
This is why we're not communicating. I keep saying "this is how you can do something to make what you want happen", and you keep hearing "we don't have to make anything new". While you're the one who;s sitting there refusing to try and actually do something rather than fantasising about this super cyberspace of the future.
Stop right there. I've been working for more than a year in my free time on Local Names. It's been through three specifications for the namespace description now. (Unfortunately, I can't show it to you right now, my server OS died halfway through an update. I'm switching it to FreeBSD 5.4 right now; Next up is to install the Apache port, and restore the 20 wiki I was running on there before, and then the Local Names pages.)
What is it? It's a general format for establishing short-name to URL bindings, and for linking namespaces to other namespaces, and defaulting between them. Think of services that bind friendly names to IOR's, except that they bind to URLs. Think of how in wiki, short names are made for long URLs, and you can connect with namespaces on other wiki. Very abstract, I know, and you can forget all about it.
Because I'm basically just saying: I do work on stuff, and I don't appreciate your saying that I don't. I've released software, and other people have built on it. Not many. The work isn't really all that impressive. But you know what? I'm working on stuff. And even though it's not the most impressive thing in the world, I don't appreciate being treated as someone who just talks about stuff, and doesn't do work. Because I do.
I strive to make software that people will want to use, that will help us all do cool things together. Just because I don't always succeed, doesn't mean that I'm not striving, and doesn't mean that I will succeed one day.
The things I talked about were not just "cyber-fantasy." We're going to see those things happen. If not just those things, we're going to see things like those things happen. The details are probably wrong, but we'll get something like it. That's the sort of stuff we should be thinking about. There's a tendency amongst people to think that the future will be just like it is now, just "faster." But it's not. It's going to be qualitatively different than it is now. And we need to stretch our imaginations out into those different worlds, to envision those different things. It's actually important. Frankly, I don't see a whole lot of people doing it. Douglass Engelbart envisions Liquid Information. There are the HeadMap people. There are people envisioning stuff, because it's the necessary predecessor to implementing the vision.
You already know this, you've seen it play out. I don't need to lecture you on this.
But I don't think they're going to chang
I'm saying: I don't think all these side-systems are going to work.
Yes, I know you made up the term yourself, so you can make it mean anything you want it to mean, but you seem to be changing what it means here. You previously were using it to refer to applications that took communication channels intended for humans and extracted data from them. Now you're using it to mean applications that happen to be implemented on a platform you don't approve of.
Somebody or some group in the next 10 years is going to make some system that does integrate all these systems into one cohesive whole, and it's going to work great, and everyone's going to want to build on it.
Maybe, but I've been hoping for a new application platform that'll do for the graphical interface what the UNIX shell did for the command line interface for a lot longer than 10 years... and it hasn't happened yet.
The web is not the end of all things, whatever the REST people would have you believe.
I. Didn't. Say. That. No matter how many times you put those words in my mouth, they're still your words, not mine.
I do work on stuff, and I don't appreciate your saying that I don't.
Whatever you're working on, it's not solving the problem you're complaining about. When I suggest a way that you can attack the problem you're complaining about, when I dare to think that there might be a way to use existing tools to make things better, when I dare to suggest that you might not have to wait 10 or 20 years for the UberSystem to get some part of what you want, what do you do? You call me a fossil again. And then complain that I'm badmouthing you?
Well, shit.
If someone isn't participating in this "new browser," or this "new virtual environment," then people won't see what you're seeing, or know what you're doing, or whatever.
Wrong.
That's NOT what I mean.
What I mean is that if this new tool, whatever it is, requires (however that's implemented, logging on, registering, broadcasting, whatever) that unless you take some explicit action to avoid it that people will be able to see what you're doing or looking at to use it... like some kind of World Wide Web Second Life cross... it won't fly.
Every time something new comes along, it lets me be in more places and do more things online at the same time. Your Not The Web But better has to allow that, surely. So. What's it going to do, rez up an avatar of me at every Not The Web But Better site? So now there's 10 different images of my icon floating in 10 cyberscapes? Or do I give up trying to juggle 10 VR selves (each of them subject to interruption) and go back to a single window like some old dumb terminal on a single-tasking OS?
You have noticably ignored the problem of: The person who was away from that environment at the time. They come back, but they can't see the conversation, because it transcended to a different dimension. (A different web page, environment.)
It doesn't "transcend to a different environment". I already brought that up... just because you're working on a shared whiteboard in the browser, that doesn't mean you're going to leave the logged-and-archived IRC conversation. If it does, then that's a problem with your whiteboard tool.
Your UberWeb environment is going to have the same problem, when Fred Manager drags the meeting off to a different Cyberscape.
You have all these different mediums, and all these different windows. "Skype." Check. "IRC." Check. "Shared web browsing window." Check. "Shared editor." Check. "Shared drawing board." Check. "Allright, cleared for takeoff!"
YOU may, because you're trying to do everything in separate programs. Your "side systems" have the same problem, they're separate programs on the outside of the web... I'm talking about implementing the tools on the platform you have rather than trying to create a bunch of separate and independant platforms that you have to keep working together.
By a "side system," I don't mean "something running on a platform I don't approve of." Rather, I mean a system that is attached to some other system, that hasn't hit mainstream use within that system. So, for example, my Local Names system, or any other infrastructure projects that people are doing, that hasn't quite made mainstream use.
RSS began as a side-system, and is now entering mainstream use, becoming part of the system.
As for how will the avatar system work: I think that when you don't feel like talking with others, but you don't mind people seeing you, you'll have it configured that way. Whatever most people are comfortable with, we'll see. I suspect that initially, most people will want privacy. But with time, people will loosen up, and permit un-interrupted visibility, except for a white list (or something like that) culled from people you talk with a lot.
When you're looking at a page, you would see little icons on the side representing other people who are looking at the document at the same time as you, and there will be something that you can click on to see the social life of the page. That is, something where you can see the most recent visitors, where they departed to, which links they clicked. If there are several people online at the time, looking at the page at the very moment, you may see their icons too.
Then you can zoom in on one of the people. You could see where their multiple selves are, what the other pages they're looking at are. You could see where they've been, as well. You could see their group affinities. If they are engaged in a live conversation, you would see a snippet of that conversation. Perhaps you could see their desktop as well. It would be a sort of "snapshot profile" of a person. And then you could drop a note for them to see later, in their periphery.
Right now, messages are all "in your face." But I think we'll have a "periphery." Messages will show up briefly in the periphery, if they're from trusted people. (A web of trust system behind it.)
You don't have to "juggle" your avatars, any more than you have to juggle web pages. Your icon just automatically shows up in other people's browsers. You could opt not to be visible. You could opt to be visible to just people in your cliques.
Well, this is the vision, at least. I think in the next 5 years, someone will implement a primitive version of this. That will inspire a family of things like this. Then 5 years after that, someone will implement a much better version, and that may be the one that lots of people use. 5 years after that, there will be a public & free version.
Or, maybe, as you note- it won't happen. We never know, really. But I think this is something we should look for and work towards.
I think it's clear that we can't implement this on top of web+AJAX. Or if we can, it would take 35 years to do so.
The shared editor and the shared drawing board and the special shared web browsing window are the problem. None of those exist. Where you need one, you bring it up in a web browser, copy the link, and *that* link is all you have to give someone to show them what you're looking at and (if what you're looking at is a collaborative tool) let them collaborate.
Right, but I'm saying-- those programs won't communicate between one another. You're not going to copy and paste a drawing into another window. And I'm saying people who haven't been following the discussion won't have clicked on the link, and will be confused when they get back. They'll have to backtrack through logs (if they have them, assuming 2 hops haven't been made) and they'll have to manually reconstruct the environment. And I'm saying that it distracts from the conversation. It's distracting enough to change mediums psychologically; Forcing people to talk URL to one another is even more so on top of that.
These sorts of things, +high quality 3D (like people will expect!), are not coming in the tools coming down the pipe.
That's what I thouht yuo were talking about.
Which is why I can't understand why you're referring to a shared whiteboard application that happens to be written using DHTML and Java and maybe SVG as a "side system".
When you're looking at a page, you would see little icons on the side representing other people who are looking at the document at the same time as you, and there will be something that you can click on to see the social life of the page.
Do I really want to see several hundred icons floating by the side of any popular web pages almost all the time?
I think it's clear that we can't implement this on top of web+AJAX. Or if we can, it would take 35 years to do so.
No, but you can implement the shared whiteboard tools that you were bemoaning the lack of on top of it.
You're not going to copy and paste a drawing into another window.
Why not? I do it all the time. Drag a picture from Wikipedia, drop it into a paint program, it shows up as a picture. Drag it to an IRC window and the URL gets pasted. What happens when you drag it into the browser depends on what you've written your Javascript to do.
And I'm saying people who haven't been following the discussion won't have clicked on the link, and will be confused when they get back.
That problem is inherent in communications that emulate physical presence, and is the thing that made me go "no, please" in the first place. It doesn't matter what your software is, people who missed the discussion missed the discussion. Using URLs to whiteboardable object on a web page reduces that as much as anything I can thing, since no matter how many objects you're operating on the chat's in the same place.
They'll have to backtrack through logs (if they have them, assuming 2 hops haven't been made) and they'll have to manually reconstruct the environment.
There's no environment to reconstruct, there's no hops that have been made: But I don't think that the super-environment I described will come about through it.
I din't say it would. I said that the functionality you need now can.
if I want to personally implement a lot of ideas together with friends, that a special uber-client is the way
You going to port it to my OS?
The things that really appear to succeed, are almost all integrated platforms. [...] wiki
I'm talking ABOUT something like Wiki.
I don't have the time to give you the full response you deserve; I'm at work in a crunch time right know.
I just wanted to tell you, very briefly:
Which is why I can't understand why you're referring to a shared whiteboard application that happens to be written using DHTML and Java and maybe SVG as a "side system".
No; Those aren't side-systems-- those are core infrastructure. (SVG will be, shortly, when Firefox 1.5 releases, and when the next IE comes out.)
I just recently wrote up (in the bus) and posted (here at work) to CW: Platforms First, which may explain my perspective better.
Okay; I think I've got a clearer understanding of how to say what I mean to say.
Let's differentiate between building a program on a platform (such as the web,) and integrating programs with protocols.
Wiki builds a program on a platform. That platform is "the web."
By "the web," I take it here to mean the sum of: HTTP, HTML, Javascript, and web browsers. Soon this will include SVG as well.
Many programs run on the platform of the web. So wiki is a program, building on a platform. There are other programs running on the platform of the web. For instance, there is Kuro5hin. There are community bulletin boards / forums. There are blogs. There is the wikipedia.
Not all of our programs that are Internet technologies run on the web. For instance: IRC, Skype, Jabber, Second Life, MMORPG's. It's important to note that many of these are very successful, even though they don't run on the web platform.
(The platform behind all the platforms, of course, is TCP/IP. Just to get clear on language.)
Now, there's this other class of thing, which is integrations between programs. This happens by way of some sort of protocol.
The most successful and well known example today is RSS. It is so successful, it is almost part of the platform. That is, first it was some wire that was drawn up by hand between programs. Then lots of people started building it into their software. If this continues, (and it will,) it will effectively be part of the platform. No longer just "HTTP+Javascript+DHTML+SVG+whatever," it will have a "+RSS" in there as well. "HTTP+Javascript+DHTML+SVG+RSS+whatever."
This is an integration between programs that grew and grew and grew until it became part of the base platform between them all.
The platform makes integrations between programs possible. The capabilities and expectations of the platform determine the integrations possible (and normal) between programs. For example, the hyperlink is common to just about everything building on the web platform. The hyperlink is near-universally respected. With RSS gaining more and more ground, it too is becoming near-universally provided & respected.
Now, after the success of RSS, many people thought, "A-hah! We know how to extend the Internet platform! We can do it from the edge of the network!" That is, they thought (and I was one of them) that the growth of the Internet would accelerate, because they'd be able to implement infrastructure from the edge of the network, and as people saw how cool it was, it would gravitate to the center, be built into new tools, etc., etc.,.
The only problem is, it didn't happen. Despite valient efforts, it became clear that people were not interested in integrating new foreign ideas into their program. "FOAF? What's that? Why do I care? Why should I bother?" There are many great ideas people have had, that would do great things, if they were implemented. But there's something about the situation, such that people simply don't do it. Even sympathetic people who would like to, somehow don't get around to doing it. I don't fully understand it yet, but there's something about the way things are set up, such that this approach is not working.
But it's clear that there's a place where new infrastructure / integration ideas is working -- that's in new platforms. In new programs featuring fully integrated environments.
It does not matter if it's built on top of the web platform, or not! Second Life does great, even though it's working off-web. The same can be said for Skype, and the same can be said even for IRC, should the complaint be that the other two obviously can't be done on today's web. Going the other way, Kuro5hin is it's own, integrated platform, with very few connections with the outside environment (except those afforded by the web platform, such as hyperlinking,) even though it's on the web.
It seems to me the things that y
You're wrong. What it really needs is one of those rainbow coloured horizontal rule gifs. They rock!
The point to them being "web applications" is not that this allows them to be integrated, but that it allows them to be used by all participants without them having to download, install, and configure software.
OK, yes. But, I think if you're making a really big and complex environment, it can be easier to just say, "Screw it," and make your own client system. I mean: MMORPGs aren't written on top of the web, Second Life isn't written on top of the web; I don't see why we should expect a super-online-collaboration-environment to be written on top of the web, either.
The closest thing to a solution I have ever seen is to restrict chat to one channel.
Exactly. This is exactly why I believe that it is so important to have a super-integrated-single-medium, rather than trying to cobble together the super-environment out of lots and lots of pieces of medium implemented on different websites.
This is exactly the reason why.
But putting all those things into one single AJAX web-app is going to be too much; It's going to be too complicated for even a large team (such as Google!) to write. For at least the next 10 years, it'll just be too hard to manufacture. To put all the code into one single AJAX environment. Just pragmatically- you're not going to be able to pull it off.
That's why I believe so strongly that we're going to see super-mediums develop in special clients. Yes, it's going to suck that they aren't as cross-platform as the web browser. But, it'll happen anyways. Because it's going to be cheaper to do it this way, and people really want to do this. People ''love'' bandwidth. (Not the bit kind; I mean the human-communication kind.)
As for the rest, I don't need to read it. Greg Egan, Cory Docterow, Charley Stross, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, these people have done a much better job of presenting that argument... and I'm way ahead of you there.
This is where I get confused. What argument do you mean? I've read all of those guys. Do you mean trans-humanism in general? Or do you mean the mechanics of some particular user interface issue that I'm missing?
(I want to note- Cory Doctorow liked Second Life. He thought it was a good idea, he thought it was cool. He didn't say, "Nah, this is dumb. It should be an AJAX app.")
What I'm talking about is a Second Life that's more focused towards developers.
I wrote two pages about my dreams for it, and why we would want such a thing:
If you're way ahead of me, I want to hear about it. If my vision is behind the times, I want to know the up-to-date version.
If you're going to argue thought that the web isn't going to be "live," if you're arguing that those "live web" ideas are dumb, then (A) I'm going to disagree with you, (B) I'm going to ask you where those authors made the argument that the web won't be live. Because I've read them, and I think that they would all agree with my vision. Not the particulars, mind you- I'm sure I'm wrong on details. But I think the general idea of how things will go? I think it's right on. Much more so than what most people imagine of the future web ("faster web pages! better graphics!"), at the very least. But maybe I am wrong. Maybe I just didn't read something, in which case: I'd like to see it. Those authors are very persuasive to me, and if they say and argue something, I think it will make more sense to me.
if you're making a really big and complex environment, it can be easier to just say, "Screw it," and make your own client system.
Right. That's kind irrelevant, though, because I'm not talking about making a really big and complex environment.
This is exactly why I believe that it is so important to have a super-integrated-single-medium
You need a super-integrated single medium to keep a chat window open at the bottom of the screen?
But putting all those things into one single AJAX web-app is going to be too much
That's why I wouldn't do it that way.
Cory Doctorow liked Second Life. He thought it was a good idea, he thought it was cool. He didn't say, "Nah, this is dumb. It should be an AJAX app."
I like SL, I think it's a good idea, I haven't said it should be an AJAX app, I just said that it's got nothing to do with Flock and interruption-intensive user interfaces.
If you're way ahead of me, I want to hear about it.
Manfred Macx mapped himself onto a flock of pigeons. When he was interested in something, he sent part of himself to look at it. When he was reincarnated in a human body agan, he had to get used to the old-fashioned idea of creating a sub-self to take care of it.
The Bureaucrat went to the Puzzle Palace and Agented himself multiple times. Each self was a full AI... he thought the idea of making his alternates less complete was silly. He didn't have to personally interact in real time with Eartth and his boss and the other members of his team, his Agents did it for him.
Gabriel routinely defers interactions with people to his subselves, even at one point leaving his lover with one while he was with another Aristoi in VR (and was deeply sorry for later).
Yatima verself doesn't split ver attention that way very much, but ve is from Konishi Polis... which is somewhat stodgy and old-fashioned: why, its citizens only get one visual and one streaming input. Ver friends in other polises pass around outlooks and gestalts routinely. In other books by Egan, some characters defer almost every interruption to their exoself.
Concurrency is hard to deal with. Even humans, who have evolved in a fully concurrent environment, are much more productive when they're NOT interrupted. Converting concurrent event streams into serialised and buffered ones is something computers do naturally. I say... take advantage of that! Manfred Macx would.
Even humans, who have evolved in a fully concurrent environment, are much more productive when they're NOT interrupted.
Oh, for sure.
Just: Some times, the explicit activity that we're trying to be productive at is holding a conversation.
It's not the end of live communication.
I have read Accelerando. Nothing in it detracts from this concept, that people have live communications with one another. In the post-human future, the definition of "live communication with full attention" changes and gets more complicated, but the basic principle is still there, and it surely doesn't defy the idea that people, present day, find value in live communication with each other.
If it's annoying that your boss plays primate games with you by commanding your attention, and doesn't simply email you, that's one thing. But to completely deny the utility of live conversation for the next few decades, is quite another.
The people that I program with, we get together every once in a while. We do it to discuss things interactively. Getting clarification where it is needed, and telling people "wait, you're going too long on this thing, I already get it," is an enormous time saver. The easiest way to do it is to meet in person. We can't quite do that, so we meet in IRC. But it is painful in IRC. If I'm looking at a web page, I have to say, "I'm looking at X web page, will you look at it to?" "Okay." "Now, do you see the part where it says Foo?" "No,..." "Down by the bottom..."
In Second Life, people can see your head turn, and get a good concept of what you're looking at. In IRC, there is no equivalent. A superior environment will make this possible and fluid and transparent. It has the possibility of being better than, more transparent than, material interaction. I think it can be that way within 15 years.
The reason why we can communicate more ideas per unit time in a live communication setting, is because we make errors when we simulate another person's mind in our head. We think that they didn't understand X, and spend more time on explaining it, when a shorter explanation would have been done fine. And we think that they would understand Y, and spend a brief moment refering to it, when in fact they don't know the basis of Y, and need some more elaboration on it. There are other reasons as well; I don't know how much energy I need to work into preparing the message for you, I think this should be enough. If I'm wrong, you'll need to send a message to me requesting clarifications, and I'll need to type to you a response.
I strongly believe that, if we were talking live, in person, this whole exchange between us would take less than 15 minutes; We would very quickly unconsciously communicate (through facial expression, gesture, and posture) "I don't need this" when we already get a point. When we need elaboration on something, we just ask. Sincerely, I tell you- this conversation would have been much more efficient, had it been a live exchange.
Let's suppose that, as I was typing this, you happened to arrive to the Slashdot. It might say at the top of the page, "You have 1 message in progress!" That would mean that I am responding to you. Let's suppose now that you had a moment, and went in to see me writing this. You see me typing away.
"Ah, Lion, I already know this stuff," you think to yourself.
While I'm writing, I see you enter the area: A small icon blinks on at the side of the page. You're here!
"Oh, hey, how you doing? What do you think?"
"Well, I already understand this idea; What I meant to say is--..."
And what would have been a very lengthy back-and-forth is cut down to a very short conversation.
Surely, there is efficiency in live communication, no?