A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I understood a vision of the alternative web browser Flock.
I spent more than a few (but less than a few tens) of hours testing the latest builds and faithfully reporting bugs. I used it as my primary browser, and I liked what I saw. In late 2006, I stopped using it because it looked like Flock was selling out to Yahoo.
But I say “a” vision, not “the” vision, because I’m just now trying Flock 1.0 after not using it for a few months, and the vision I saw back in 2006 doesn’t at all match up with what Flock 1.0 delivers. The vision of Flock 1.0 is looking way, way down the road, much farther than the earlier builds. Yep, it has still kinda sold out to Yahoo, but it’s not that intrusive. Plus, now that Yahoo has bought out both Del.icio.us and Flickr, I’m not so sure that selling out to Yahoo doesn’t represent a pretty good vision.
Flock 1.0 includes a home page called “My World” that centralizes my contacts from Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Blogger and more. On one page, I can see everybody’s recent updates (no matter what site they updated). Within a few hours of installing Flock 1.0, I found myself digging deeper into each of my friends’ online presences, examining what sites they’ve joined and trying to see more about their lives. For example, I had no idea Lan was uploading photos to Facebook, or that she had a YouTube account. I started wondering how web geeks were ever going to survive without a single, consolidated view of everybody’s presence. I wanted to start pushing all of my presence tools (Twitter especially) onto everybody I knew, and I wondered when Flock would support more sites (LinkedIn.com first, Last.FM next).
I get it! There’s some great vision going on here.
As an avid iPhone user, I didn’t want to like Flock 1.0. I’d read Daryl’s post about Flock 1.0 and thought I had to at least try it, but I figured I wouldn’t like it because I love Bloglines. With Bloglines, I can subscribe to RSS feeds, and then read them from any web browser. When I read articles on my iPhone, they’re automatically marked as read, so when I later peruse feeds from my office Mac, they’re marked as read. Same thing with when I read feeds from my home Windows machine. Flock is a workstation-based feed reader, so when I read feeds on my home Windows machine with Flock, those feeds aren’t marked as read on Bloglines (or on my Flock setup on the Mac), so I have to mark them as read again. That’s nowhere near elegant.
But you know what I discovered? The integrated, people-aware browser is so gosh-darned compelling that I don’t mind. I use Flock at home on my Windows box, and it’s fantastic. It doesn’t replace Bloglines for feed reading, but for being people-aware, there’s nothing even close to it. I haven’t tried the Me.dium plugin yet, but I’m eying it lustfully.
Flock’s got potential. What’s missing? Well, it needs to sync profiles across machines. When I mark an article as read from my work Mac, it needs to mark that article as read on my home Windows machine, and on my iPhone. Yeah, I know, that’s almost impossibly difficult, and there’s an extremely low number of folks like me that run Windows, Mac and an iPhone, but that’s what being an early adopter is like.
But here’s the kicker for me: that’s the only thing missing so far.
I’ve been giving it a shot as my primary browser at home for the last couple of days, and I’m going to go for it at work too. I won’t say I’ll give up Bloglines by any means, but Flock 1.0 is pretty darned good. Good enough that I’m going to try this blog post from Flock’s built-in blog editor.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: flock
