DISQUS

Just a point of clarification: it ain't Google money.

There's always the option of staging a free Bar Camp somewhere in town -- though there ain't much time to make it happen (though more time than we planned the original in). Given that the first Bar Camp was planned in 6 days, there is still plenty of time to make it happen.

I made a logo for you. ;)

Hey man, spread the meme: EFF the RIAA.

Hey man, spread the meme: EFF the RIAA.

So did you go? How was it? I missed it coz I was at Bar Camp Dallas!

Hey Robert, this was a really interesting and satisfying experience. I've not had a whole lot of interaction with Microsoft folks in recent memory, not necessary on purpose, but because our communities are so polarized (owing to history, etc that precedes me).

I might be an idiot for saying this, but we really just need tools that work -- and I don't care if that means that they come from someone other than Microsoft or not. If there are things that we can learn from each other, hell, what's wrong with that?

Overall, Jim was really candid about most topics -- even admitting that the Vista beta program took a lot of inspiration from the open source community. I mean, hey sure, you guys got a ways to go but you're getting there! ;)

With folks like you, Robert, pushing for more transparency @ MSFT, gee, we might someday lose the ability to argue about you guys being all closed up and stuff. We'd have to turn our laser-like attention on more... opaque fruity companies instead! (We'd still humbug about your monopoly and whatnot, but that comes with the territory).

Cool, no worries! And this theme is much better than the previous one! ;)

Hey John, Flock really isn't a fork of Firefox. Yes, we're going off in a different direction but we're not forking the platform to do so. In fact, development is much slower because we're working around Firefox as our core platform. Ideally our work will be able to be pulled back to Firefox, either as extensions and or platform improvements -- after all, that's the beauty of open source.

Now, in terms of my duct tape comment, I was referring generally to extensions -- since oftentimes the quality varies to a great degree from one extension to another. Personally, I'm a big fan of extensions and use quite a few myself. But I know that, for example, if I wanted to get my mom (or even my college-aged brother) blogging, he'd be hard pressed to get going. There are so many things that we who are already blogging have figured out on our own that aren't simple, aren't intuitive and aren't easy about publishing online. I mean, I used to work on a platform that was dedicated to web publishing. It wasn't easy -- and oftentimes the meager results of using a web-page based editor left authors disappointed and frustrated.

With Flock the goal is make it possible to better use your browser for two-way communication, whether via blogs, podcasts, video and so on. We're still figuring out the infrastructure to support all of these new mecasting technologies, and so we see that these platforms would all benefit from having a client that can actually interface with their APIs in one unified interface. Let's face it, learning a new UI paradigm every time there's a new web service is counterproductive. Long term, Flock aims to ameliorate that problem.

Anyway, it's quite clear that we need to better communicate what we're doing, how we're going to do it and get releases out in a timely manner. We're learning an awful lot in the process. Seeing projects like Performancing come out is actually very encouraging -- because it's clear that having publishing tools in the browser does make sense for a lot of people. We just need to perfect the user experience and suddenly (or at least the hope goes) Flock will begin to make a lot more sense.

Best advice I've heard in awhile: "So release early and put on your flack jacket."

Thank you, David, for raising that important aspect of this discussion.

Hey Matt,

Thanks for the feedback. I very much appreciate the rationality of your response -- and the point about folks becoming "binary" about these things is pretty spot on.

I didn't ask Mike to write his post or to come to our defense or anything -- I did point him to my post in a conversation that he and I were having last night and an hour later he said that I had "inspired" him (!).

So I think the bigger point that he was responding to -- and which is why I think he continues to like Flock -- is that there is a bigger idea here and more at work in the way the web is changing that current thinking simply doesn't yet address. I'm working on Flock as a 10 year project; I'm working on Open Source as a 10 year project. Damn, the web has made us an impatient lot. Yeah, well, a little patience, a little hope and some elbow grease, yeh, that's what's gonna make this thing better and no longer just the neighborhood of the geeks. Well, that's what I'm hoping for anyway.

FYI, we've got a date now -- hope I can make it!

Hi Jeremy,

I’ve never heard of the behavior you’re mentioning. In fact, we don’t automatically create bookmarks at all. The most frequently visited sites is simply a query that we run against your history—it’s totally separate from your bookmarks.

Are you sure you didn’t accidently hit the star button when you were on one of those pages? And if you don’t remember, is the star button orange on the pages you’re referring to?

Glad you figured out the WordPress thing -- had me freaked for a second there!

Also, we'll have Furl support in a future release for sure. We've already been talking with them, so you're covered. For now it's del.icio.us, but in the future, it'll be as easy to change your social bookmarking service as easy as you can blogging tools.

Great meeting you f2f. Really digging your work and looking forward to seeing Rhyzomatic happen! Let's keep plugging on that -- and get yo' ass back out here!

Watch for something public in October. You'll be very pleased. :)