Que Pasa, Flock?
A thought for a Sunday morning: what ever happened to Flock? It was just a few months ago that everyone wanted a peek at the new browser for Web 2.0 - but today's the buzz is gone, although it appears the company is still toiling away on new features. Perhaps this is the cruel reality of Web 2.0 - it's relatively easy and inexpensive to develop a new service/application but getting traction with users continues to be the real challenge. Flock had a big window of opportunity with an enormous amount of pre-launch buzz but it failed to impress when the alpha finally appeared on the scene. So what now? Is there still life for Flock and, if so, will anyone give it anyone shot? If there is a silver lining to Flock's effort is it demonstrates how Mozilla and Firefox can be used a platform to create niche-oriented browsers. Songbird is a great example where developers took the Firefox browser engine to build a cool music player. Here's hoping there are still developers willing to create a new browser. As Firefox demonstrated, there is demand for something different and better.
May 7th, 2006 at 10:33 am
Web 2.0 developers have lived by “release early, release often”. A mantra championed most notably by 37Signals. Flock certainly released a preview very early, and the buzz it generated helped a little bit (or did it hurt Flock?).
Releasing often is another issue. As you reported, I haven't heard anything from Flock ever since the initial hype. Does anybody else think “release early, release often” applies in this case?
May 8th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
Hey Mark,
We're still alive and well, thanks. We've been in quiet mode until recently because we were focusing on the product. Your question is timely because our first beta release, Cardinal, is coming out later this month. Everyone is as busy as elves before Christmas; which is why I couldn't make it to Mesh, incidentally.
We're hoping this release will make Flock appealing to the millions of what I call “social web youth”. They're the folks on Myspace, Facebook, Photobucket, Flickr, Xanga, Livejournal, YouTube, etc. The goal is to convince those people to not only give it a shot, but ditch Internet Explorer and make Flock their primary browser. From the excitement inside the company and from our community it looks like we're going to hit the mark this time, so we'll see how well the rest of the world likes our little browser.
We have been hard at work on features, but we're also trying to put a lot of effort into making Flock the best experience browser. The poor user experience of using a smattering of web services together is one of the big problems we're trying to solve.
We would love to hear your feedback when the first beta comes out.
Cheers,
Will Pate
Community Ambassador, Flock