I spent some of last night and this morning playing with Flock, the new exciting web browser that everyone’s talking about. Flock is purported to be a “move forward” for web browsing, combining passive browsing with active social software elements such as blogging and social bookmarking. The blurb sounds promising, even if I don’t like the name (”Flock” suggests a sheep-like herd mentality). However, although it looks nice (using Gecko as the main engine - see screenshots), I’m not exactly blown away. It is not the amazing breakthrough that everyone says it is.

Flock does have some interesting features. Like the ability to post blog posts straight from the browser. Which is nice, but I already have a way of sending blog posts from my browser - it’s called my blog. With the WordPress “Write Post” page bookmarked, I can start a blog post in a new tab pretty much instantly, and have more features (categorisation, pinging etc.) than the limited in-browser controls Flock has. Drag and drop’s a nice touch, but only if you don’t use keyboard shortcuts all the time like I do.

Flock also allows you to add in photos from your Flickr photostream into your blog. Again, nice, but Flickr already has this functionality with it’s “Blog This” control, and again, the Flickr interface is much richer than the one that Flock can offer. As well as this, Flock also allows you to post to del.icio.us straight from the browser - nice, but the Firefox extension for del.icio.us has been out for yonks. There’s also some RSS autodiscovery and aggregation stuff for news and blogs, but y’know, that’s not exactly anything new either.

Still, there are a couple of actually good features. The ability to synchronise local bookmarks with your del.icio.us ones is handy, although not for everyone. And the best new feature - the ability to do proper content searches on your browser history, and keep track of frequently visited pages is nice. But if anything, this should be in Firefox proper, and not just in Flock, since plenty of people who aren’t bloggers would find this feature welcome.

Flock is supposedly another step towards Web 2.0, but I think it’s the opposite. Rather than allow the free use of data, mixing of different media and the ability to create unique configurations different compatible technologies at will, it compartmentalises everything. Del.icio.us is defined only as a bookmarking tool (not a linklogging tool like I used it). Flickr is little more than a photo hosting site for blogs. All blogs have the same posting interface. RSS is just for reading news and blogs, not getting search results or podcasts. All these features are kept in their place and only permitted certain interactions with each other. Flock does little to further empower the user, encourage remix and reuse, or widespread social collaboration.

Little bit of social construction of technology dropped in here: technologists (of all kinds, not just information) create and form products according to their own prejudices and definitions of what “user” and “technology” and other key concepts mean. While this is a blog post, not a full analysis, I won’t make any conclusions (especially as it is only at version 0.5 so far), but… I suspect the Flock team are actually quite conservative; they are designing a product that they want to make existing tasks that they already carry out easier, rather than being bold and inventive and finding new things to do with what’s out there. At the moment, Flock is little more than what I can achieve with Firefox and a few well-chosen extensions.

A really bold client-side Web 2.0 app would not be as discriminatory, and allow us to browse photos, links, blog posts, news, search results,wikis, web services, audio, video etc. via tags and other social navigation methods, treating them with little distinction, adding minimal embellishment and with no compartmentalisation. Such an app would probably be quite dull in its plain vanilla flavour, and would probably require high-level scripting (at the natural language level), extensions and additional configurations on top for it to be a rewarding experience, which would be different for every user. The first attempts to make it will probably fail. But whatever it does turn out to be, I’m fairly sure it won’t be the formalised, monolithic app that Flock looks like becoming.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 at 12:35:39 and is filed under General.