Business Logs

Flock Soars Like An Ostrich

Friday, October 21st, 2005 by MR

With the private beta scrapped because of P2P leaks of the Flock installer, the bird team decided to step-up and drop a public beta into everybody’s laps. Their Flock homepage is full of disclaimers, but that didn’t stop some people from raining on their parade:

Unfortunately, the product really isn’t ready for prime time use. [...] Flock is horribly slow - at least on OS X - and worse, the feature set is really really confusing. Firefox, even when it was a 0.x release, was ten times more mature. Maybe that’s why it hit 100M downloads - it works! [...] My suggestion is to keep it simple, guys. Give me something that makes my life easier, not harder. So thumbs down for now, but I will give it another look when you ship.
— Steve Rubel

I’ve only used it for a little while, but I definitely noticed the speed lags. Safari is my primary browser, and for me to make the switch to Flock, it will have to be faster than Safari is — a tall task indeed.

Many were anxious to take a look at the product, and were even willing to overlook a sloppy demo at the Web 2.0 conference. Flock started life as Round Two with a focus on security extensions but quickly changed its game to being a social browser. What it means is that the browser integrates social apps like del.icio.us, Flickr, RSS readers and blogging tool. On paper, this makes absolute sense, but then reality and concepts rarely have much in common. So what does the world at large generally think of this? The early verdict is that there is no verdict. [...] Maybe I will get used to Flock later (UI is pretty nice), but for now I find scratching my head, wondering if this will ever be my permanent browser.
— Om Malik

I have to confess, however, that I’ve messed with it and been largely unimpressed. It is nowhere near as feature-rich as my preferred browsing tool, Maxthon, and the only interesting distinct feature, integrated blog posting, consistently screwed up commas and quotes when posting to this site. While I’m not convinced Flock is a pure raise-VC-money ploy, as some cynics think, I’m also not very excited by what I’ve seen.
—Paul Kedrovsky

And don’t get me started, even, about the little fake applications that launch before the actual browser launches. Something appears in the Dock, starts bouncing, then disappears. Something else appears, then immediately disappears. Then, nothing happens. Just as you start thinking “maybe it crashed”, the actual program starts running. What’s up with this? [...] Thus, harsh as it may be, my judgement after just four minutes of using this piece of software is: it sucks. And I don’t expect it to suck much else in version 1.0 either.
— Soeren Kuklau

Brian Benzinger reviewed Flock over at Solution Watch and gave it a fairly positive review:

Flock did a good job at sticking to the basic structure of a browser and basically looks like a beautified Firefox, but with extra features. The buttons on the navigation bar has the basic back, forward, refresh, and home button. But you also get a few new buttons such as a button to open the blog editor, the favorites manager, and the star button to star a site. [...] The blog editor actually surprised me on what can be accomplished with it. [...]
— Brian Benzinger

Flock PR Tastes Del.icio.us!

One of the things that Brian mentions later in the post is that when you first open Flock is syncs your favorites to your del.icio.us account somewhat automatically. If you have tried Flock, you see that the browser adds a few extra favorites by default which include the Flock homepage as well as the Five Ways To Get Started page. Nothing out of the ordinary yet…

…except it adds Flock links to your favorites and then syncs with delicious, which has made Flock links #1 and #2 at the delicious popular links page. So basically, the Flockers have hijacked the popular rankings at the most popular social bookmarking site in the entire world because of bad code. Or was it bad code? Did they plan on doing this so they could tip the leaning tower of buzz over a bit more? Regardless of the reasoning, that’s just bad form. I suggest waking your employees up and getting this fixed ASAP before your reputation is FUBAR.

Reader Comments

8 Responses to “Flock Soars Like An Ostrich”

Sam Says:

I was playing around with Flock earlier and, just like everyone else it seams, found that it was cool, but not worth the “OMG-ITS TEH AW3SOME BFF” hype it was getting after the web 2.0 conference. If it was a sleeper launch instead of relying on the buzz, the response would have probably been better.

And I don’t think they did the del.icio.us hijack on purpose. c’mon man, What do you think this is? web 1.0? jeez ;)

October 21st, 2005 at 4:35 pm

Jack Says:

I’ll try it when it ships but until then I’m going to wait for copycat Firefox extensions.

October 21st, 2005 at 9:20 pm

Paul Stamatiou Says:

“Flock is not the browser that just anyone can pick up and use. Unlike Firefox, there is a slightly sharper learning curve. The way regular bookmarks are managed has changed, making it remarkably different from IE and Firefox, but seemingly closer to the way Safari handles bookmarks. Oh and I should mention, they are now called favorites not bookmarks. Apparently the bookmark has lost its cool factor now. Flock is not yet compatible with every extension and theme made for Firefox, therefore much of the functionality that Firefox users gain from extensions will be lost in Flock.”

A little something from my review, found here.

October 22nd, 2005 at 2:59 am

Mike D. Says:

I agree with most of this. It just seems like a slightly nicer looking version of Firefox with some theoretically nice extras features that I will probably never need or use. It’s too bad because it’s a good idea in theory.

As for the delicious hijacking thing, when I first saw it sync locally with my delicious bookmarks, I immediately saw the Flockmarks in that list and thought the same thing: “What a sneaky/shady way to publicize yourself!” But then I went to my delicious bookmarks online and the Flockmarks weren’t there. So I guess I kind of doubt that the reports of the hijacking are true. They *appear* to be true, but they aren’t… at least in my experience. And I downloaded it the first day.

By the way, if delicious is the second most popular social bookmarking site, what is the first? Furl? I know I’m missing something obvious here.

October 22nd, 2005 at 11:53 am

Mike Rundle Says:

The del.icio.us links appear to be removed from the popular section, so add a point to the home team!

October 22nd, 2005 at 1:14 pm

Alex Young Says:

I think what makes Flock unique, and what will make it successful, is that it’s aware of web services. When you add your blog, it can handle talking to the generic xmlrpc interface blog software often uses. It can use del.icio.us and Flickr too, as you know. However, if you look at the preferences pane, it simply mentions ‘web services’ - it looks like it will allow you to use alternate services in the future.

That’s interesting enough, but what if they add UDDI and WDSL to Flock? What if Flock could do more than inform the user about news feeds, but also inform them of services and provide integration with and between web services?

That would take browsers to a new service-oriented level. That could be something worth getting exciting about.

October 22nd, 2005 at 5:44 pm

Geoffrey Says:

Thanks to both sides for the criticism and support. We know that there is a lot of work ahead of us, but fortunately, the feedback has been flowing in. The amount of buzz and interest raises the stakes, but I have to say our goal for this release was really just to get feedback and community involvement. File sharing accelerated our schedule by about a week, but at that point we decided to move forward so that we could have a site up so that we could properly cultivate user feedback. An extra week would have been nice, but given the amount of community interest, things seem to be working out. Mike R, the title of your story “Flock Soars Like An Ostrich” is far and away my favorite. ;)

October 22nd, 2005 at 10:34 pm