Chris Messina on Flock's Cardinal Release

Chris Messina, formerly of Flock, suggests that Flock doesn't get the social dimension of social browsers:

[from Who is Will Tschumy? Plus: Cardinal Pre-review at FactoryCity]

Flock still doesn’t seem to have a clear conception of a “friend” or even a person. This makes managing my friends across services no easier than it was before and since the interaction model doesn’t seem any more clear, I’m not entirely incented to move over my Flickr or feed-reading activities to Flock. In fact, NetNewsWire (on sale now for $19.95!), the native Flickr website and 1001 take care of me just fine. I’m dying for the day when a browser finally does get the idea of a “person” — someone that I can subscribe to, that I can add to my universal friend or contact lists, with whom I can communicate directly — synchronously or asynchronously… separately, in tandem or with a group of others. This is fundamental to the original Flock vision and what will really set it apart from any other browser (current page, browser history and bookmarks are simply no longer sufficient!).

Apart from that (acknowledging that that one feature is a huge undertaking) the feed reading and Favorite integration seems to completely have fallen apart. We’re back to the aggregator-plus-browser model for consuming syndicating content. This is not where the browser of the next 10 years should be going! Mitigate against the flow of information — bring it together and help me better understand and make use of it! Don’t just make it easier to subscribe, to collate, to stockpile! That’s the problem we already have! That was why I combined Favorites and Feeds — there is no difference, they’re simply different views of the same thing and should be treated as such.

Ouch.

Flock seems to have fallen down an elevator shaft since their much touted debut last year. Chris certainly is pulling any punches, here. I will try to get access to Cardinal, and see what's up.

tags: chris+messina, flock, flock+cardinal, social+browser, social+tools

Comments

[Bart Decrem]

Hi Stowe,

Thanks for checking in.

Things are actually going great at Flock. In fact, we're just a few weeks away from a consumer grade beta release that we are very excited about.

Chris is right that we're not yet dealing with the idea of "people in the browser" head on. We decided that was just too much to bite off for this particular release, but we're looking forward to tackling that in our next release, and what we're doing with photos in the Cardinal release provides a solid framework for a more generalized approach to people a few months later.

I disagree with Chris on how to treat RSS. In an era where pretty much every interesting web page has one or more RSS feeds associated with it, treating RSS "automagically" as part of a favorites story simply cannot be a full answer. All other browser makers have reached the same conclusion as we have. What we're doing in Cardinal is making it dead easy for people to build their personal newspaper, and I'm very proud of our RSS aggregation.

More generally, we are trying to reach well beyond the "web 2.0 digerati" crowd and build a product that's going to address tangible pain points for the tens of millions of people who are engaging socially online, be it on Flickr, PhotoBucket, MySpace, etc. Those users have different needs then folks like Chris Messina, although we certainly hope that our browser will have terrific features for high end users like Chris (who, in the post you are referencing, points out quite a few features that he's impressed with).

[Will Pate]

Hey Stowe,

Let's remember that we are talking about a first beta release here. It's easy for people excited about the social web and visionaries like Chris to be disappointed in Flock because it gave those folks a lot of hope for what a browser could be, but we can't live up to all the hype with our first release that's ready for non developers. Imagine if people said that Phoenix didn't deliver on their hopes of true browser choice in a post Internet Explorer internet, before it even became what we know today as Firefox. We simply cannot solve all the problems Chris has described the first time around, but we're thinking very hard about them for the future, and Chris of course knows that.

Flock has certainly not fallen down an elevator shaft. We've been in quiet mode until recently because we were focusing on the product. Getting declared the prom king before we even finished shining our dancing shoes means we want to be all the more sure we're ready.

There are some cool things in the first beta that make it really worth checking out. This one will make it easier to upload, share (blog and comment) and subscribe to friends' photos; subscribe to RSS feeds; and search local history, bookmarks and the internet at the same time. We're making the social web easier and more appealing for non-geeks, one action and behavior at a time.

I'd be happy to give you a personal demo on or after release day. If you just can't wait to check out what we're working on you can test out one of the hourly builds anytime, but we're not even at RC1 yet so if you spot any loose ends kindly let us know.

Cheers,

Will Pate
Community Ambassador, Flock

[Chris Messina]

Sweet! Well, as Will points out, I continue to be jazzed to see what they've got up their sleeves and equally thrilled to see their ideas and process unfold.

I guess my early (and far from final) disappointment stems from the fact that there are already a bunch of basic tools that try to make entry into social media "easier for mom" but end up actually dumbing down what quickly become pretty complicated matters... and only end up making it even harder to get into! Those tools which seem designed and focused on everyday use may have higher learning curves but ultimately stand the test of time as people unpack and explore what's possible.

And it is absolutely true that I was using a pre-release Milestone build -- meaning that there's much improvements to be made before their public beta ships. Perhaps my concern is that, if you're going to build a browser for "tens of millions of internet users", I'd think that it would have to be as simple as Firefox, if not simpler -- at least conceptually. Think moped complexity against a Mercedes SLR. Think "Add a friend" -- and have it work on all sites. Think "turn the key in your browser and just go".

I mean, as Bart pointed out, it's quite true that I'm an advanced user -- one who, like you Stowe, experience a great deal of frustration and inefficiency with the browsers we have today. As you know -- social media is unlike most media that's come before -- in that it's unpredictable, interactive and diffuse. And yet all the more vital, interesting and enlightening. Thus the browser that comes in and helps you and I make sense of this new world will not only prove immensely valuable to us uber-geeks immediately, but down the road (say in a year or so) to non-geeks who are jsut waking up to the realities and complexities of social media.

I would posit that other browsers have not "reached the same conclusion" about RSS -- and I'm not even sure that they've reached a conclusion about RSS at all. In Firefox, the issue remains hotly debated. In IE7, they've basically copyied Safari. Those browsers fundamentally have not engaged the matter of RSS; instead they've taken the model of static web pages and tried to shoehorn dynamic content into them. This is not a satisfactory solution for the long term. And for a browser that has the best opportunity to reexamine and reconsider everything a browser's been for the last 10 years and what it should be for the next 10, I think it far undercuts the promise of the original vision and promise to simply accept what others have kludged into their products as conclusions.

And so I only offer my criticism, harsh as it may seem, in the hope that, by Flock 1.0, it's really come as far as Firefox came from the early days of Phoenix.