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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."
Hmm... it has gradients... it has shadows... why, this must be Web 2.0!
The "Go back" and "Go forward" buttons have merged into an all powerful "stay here" button.
A social browser is what you contract from visiting too many websites.
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.
I thought the same thing until I actually tried the Flock Developer Preview that was just released. (I'm posting this from it now.)
I was all set to be unimpressed but I have to tell you, it's pretty impressive if you have a blog how easy they have made posting Web content to it. There's a "shelf" tool, for starters, that you use by just highlighting any text on a page and dragging-and-dropping it into the Shelf. Then, when you want to post about that text, you just click the "Blog this" button on the toolbar; this opens a new post (Flock autodetects the settings for your blog, so there's no configuration if you use most popular packages) in a WYSIWYG editor. Drag the text from the shelf into the editor and it pops the text in, encloses it in BLOCKQUOTE tags, and adds the cite="" attribute with the URL from the original page.
Revolutionary? Maybe not. But it's so damn slick! Currently when I blog something I copy it from Firefox into an HTML editor (Movable Type's built in editor sucks), mark it up there, log into the admin screen for my blog, then paste the marked-up text into a new post. Oh, and then I have to go back and find the original URL, copy it, and paste it in the appropriate pages. That's a lot of back and forth that Flock eliminates.
Some people use a tool like MarsEdit or wBloggar to combine the "markup" and "posting" steps together in one place. But Flock puts all the features of those products right in my browser -- no switching between programs, no copy/paste gymnastics. There's a market for those products, so it's not a big leap to imagine a market for Flock, either (albeit a small one).
It'll be interesting to see how well Flock holds up to ongoing use over time. But my first impressions are better than I expected them to be. You might want to try it too before you pass judgement...
(Random other observation: Flock changes the default engine for the Firefox search box from Google to Yahoo! A political statement? Is Yahoo! connected to Flock somehow? Veeery interesting...)
Read my blog.
for those of you asking what the hype is all about. here's what we've got so far that's different in Flock:
1. replaces old-school bookmarks with one-click social bookmarking to Del.icio.us
2. tagging is there if you want to do two-click bookmarking and tag
3. a new bookmarks manager with an integrated rss reader
4. built in search engine that indexes every page you visit and has a Spotlight-style as-you-type UI
5. keeps a list of the sites you visit most frequently
6. multiple bookmarks toolbar (one for work, one for play etc.)
7. finds feeds, lets you view them
8. caches the feeds so you can read them on the train
9. aggregated RSS view for all of your bookmarks folders
10. integrated blog editor (support wordpress, movable type, blogger)
11. one click 'blog this' feature (it does the blockquotes, citations and all that stuff for you)
12. Flickr integration (drag and drop pix into blogs)
13. shelf: a web scrapbook that helps you organizae stuff you want to blog
and of course it's open source and cross platform.
details at http://www.flock.com/fiveways/togetstarted/13.php