Slashdot Mirror
Firefox-based Social Browser Flock Launches
daria42 writes "The much-hyped Flock, a new browser based on Mozilla Firefox and integrating features like RSS feeds, blogging tools, the del.icio.us social bookmarking and Flickr photo sharing services has just launched a public developer preview to the world. Flock is being driven by a team of developers being led by Bart Decrem, a well-known open source developer who co-founded the ill-fated Eazel project back in 1999 and has been involved with both the Mozilla and GNOME foundations. On his blog this week he says Flock won't be forking the Firefox codebase."
Every once in a while someone makes a +5 Insightful comment about how there should be a version of Firefox with the more popular extentions built in so that the average user gets more functionality and doesn't have to do all the work themselves.
Finally someone does it, and people are quick to start belittling it for not being something fantastic and earth shattering. It said straight up that it was based on Firefox.
It's not doing anything nasty like Netscape did, so this just means that there are more alternatives out there. Last time I checked, that was considered to be good around here.
Thats where a homeostatic feedback system can really help.
Currently the web is a sort of one way medium. With flock, it can help it to become a 2 way medium much easier.
Agents in this sort of system (People will then be able to filter out the data for the masses to consume.
Have a look at reddit.com
Its a great example of how the wider community filters out the bad stuff.
Another is to take a look a slashdot.
Its a two way system. You post, someone moderates.
Overall it creates a collective emergent intelligence which filters out the bad stuff and leaves in information you desire.
The higher the score, the better this system works.
The key part is of course the identity of an agent.
I'm pretty sure someone isn't going to spend lots of time manually building up their karma just to get banned in one fell swoop by posting up a few ads. Its simply not cost effective.
I was just having a lunch discussion about this sort of thing. One of our engineers was telling me how he couldn't care less about all this blogging social sharing fandangle.
Which is fair enough.
This web 2.0 is rather new. It's still trying to be defined. What we are seeing at this stage is new technologies that allow for a greater social interaction. Meanwhile the underlying systems are creating an emergent intelligence that can provide you with a greater experience.
It's a new technology and who else is better than understanding new technology than youngsters?
I still recall the time when cellphones were starting to become the mainstream. The older folk kept on asking why anyone would want such a device. Turn the clock forward and pretty much the entire younger generation at that time now has a cellphone. They identified the capability and found new uses for the technology.
This web 2.0 buzz is simply that cycle repeating. No one has anything against you not giving a care about these new systems. but. what you should do is stand aside while the people that embrace that "moved cheese" start to live a better and fully life using the technologies designed specifically for this purpose
To me, sharing bookmarks with myself across multiple computers is the main attraction of Flock. It's favorites feature also is an improvement over Firefox's classic-style of bookmarks which is just impossible to use when you get into hundreds of bookmarks. I like being able to tag bookmarks and search/browse them by tags.
As for community features. I'm not sure they belong merged into the browser but I'm not sure they don't either so it's a worthy experiment. I'm sure the better parts will get merged backwards into Firefox. Community sites shouldn't be a replacement for a social life but they can provide an extension of a social life. Obviously you're using Slashdot so you have no room to make fun of users of community sites.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.