October 24, 2005
not quite flocking
Been playing with Flock, the Web 2.0-aware browser. It has some nifty features, but it hasn’t really grabbed me. I like how big a leap it takes into the Web 2.0 realm - bringing blogging tools and web services such as delicious and Flickr to the desktop - but I don’t find the UI and features work for me.
Maybe I’m not the kind of power user Flock is made for. I find that I use my delicious more for history and sharing more than for regular bookmark use - I rarely need to look back into my delicious bookmarks for anything. My often-used bookmarks, which I want quick access to, are more personal and not worth sharing (banking, bloglines.com, company intranet, various servers i develop on, etc.). I find that the delicious bookmarklet is convenient enough for adding new bookmarks - so I guess I don’t find the client-side bookmark management that compelling (yet). I don’t use Flickr so I don’t have anything to say about the Flickr support.
Flock’s other main features, the feed aggregator and blogging client, have tough competition from specialized apps like ecto, NetNewsWire and bloglines.com. Having all these features in one app would only work for me if they provided greater value bundled than separate. Meaning that they would have to match all the necessary features of the apps I already use, and then provide some additional value by being able to exploit commonalities in ways that standalone apps can’t. I wasn’t able to get the blogging interface working with my WordPress blog, unfortunately, so I wasn’t able to check that out - I just get the error:
Alert There was and error detecting your blog settings Method blogger.getUsersBlogs not supported
Ahh… the joys of beta.
I definitely like the concept, and knowing that this is not even 1.0, there is a lot of potential coolness coming for Flock. I think that if the Flockers keep tabs on users’ needs and continue to innovate they could spawn a very killer app.
posted: 2:58 pm
Not really into Flock. Just wanting to play with sxore.
Thank you for the feedback and bug report.
Thanks for the mention. Ultimately, the idea is that what services one uses will be transparent. If we make it dead simple for people to upload and blog images, it won’t matter whether they’re flickr users. The same goes for bookmarking. Once we refine things a bit and accommodate privacy, it won’t matter what service hosts your favorites; you’ll just manipulate/tag them in a convenient way and the mechanism/service will be immaterial.