The Coop, Social Networking For Mozilla

smileham noted a story about Mozilla developers considering work on a "social networking" Firefox extension called the "Coop" to take up where Flock left off. Also here is a wiki on the subject.

Comments

Re:Is that Flock or Flop?

[Jekler]

I thought Flock had a decent idea but as it developed it became less of the things I wanted and more of the things a 12 year kid might want.

For example, at first the idea of giving "Web 2.0" almost seamless integration sounded great. I imagined it similar to how MSN Explorer integrated Hotmail. I got the idea that Flock would do this with things like Wiki, certain popular blog sites, gmail, youtube, etc. with development making the features increasingly generic so more sites get included in the integration.

Instead, they overwrote certain FireFox features that were important to me (For example: keywords), forced me to log in to del.icio.us everytime I opened the browser, but left the actual user experience largely unchanged. Nothing on the web was any easier, different, or more integrated. Their sights were narrowed on Flickr, Photobucket, and blog APIs, but the browser doesn't change the web experience as a whole.

As a result, I was just better off using FireFox. Once FireFox 2 came along, it delivered some of the features Flock had, while Flock got stuck using FireFox 1.5.

I thought the idea was good, the execution was poor.

Re:Is that Flock or Flop?

[Brento]

I thought the idea was good, the execution was poor.

As somebody who used to live off the nightly builds, I can say that the problem wasn't that the execution was poor - it was that the ideas changed too much, too frequently. Have a vision, document it, and then build it. The programmers appeared to be tasked with executing visions that changed dramatically on a monthly basis.

I would test whole featuresets only to find them disappear completely out of the next build. My (least) favorite was the RSS integration. It's integrated with the bookmarks, no wait it's a separate thing, no wait it's gone altogether. Huh? Development time was wasted, testing time was wasted, and users got flaked out.