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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?
Because the text on that page is GIGANTIC.
VOTE!
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!
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!"
... Flock off!!
I ran so far away.
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!
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.
I've seen this feature before, but I can't recall where...
Wired says it is based on firefox;http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,128 2,68823,00.html?tw=rss.TOP
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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
They're actually pirating FireFox.
In all seriousness, though, it's a bunch of FireFox developers who're whacking FireFox into a new form.
- "I'll probably get modded down for this."
And I suppose everyone using it... Will be sheep?
Flock ewe!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I hate to reply to myself, but this screen shot of flock 0.1 confirms that it is based on firefox. http://flickr.com/photos/87617152@N00/310576292 /
Taken from the flock blog http://www.decrem.com/bart/2005/08/done-flock-01-
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.
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."
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?
Baaaaaaaaaaaad.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
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
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
..."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.
In short, it's:
Read the review for more.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
>> 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.
It's just you. You must need a new browser, dude.
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.
----------------------
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.
That was the first time a website actually startled me.
No joke. What the flock were they thinking when they made that flocking website. Maybe you have to use their flocking browser just to see their site correctly, with the flocking "hegiht" attributes and all.
flock.com till it kills ya, or blinds you anyways...
http://mehtuus.googlepages.com