DISQUS

Hey Jack,

Funny post. :)

FYI, we disabled Google Toolbar because there is a bug in the toolbar causing it to read Flock 1.x as Firefox 3, activating features Flock 1.x (and Firefox 2, which it is based off of) doesn't support. This causes Flock to crash upon startup. That's a pretty lame user experience, so we've disabled it.

The bug has been reported to Google, and until they get to fixing it the best solution is to download the Flock 2 Beta, which is based on Firefox 3 and will run the toolbar fine (note: you may need to wait 24 hours after installing Flock 2 for the Google Toolbar to work). Plus, Flock 2 is much more performant than Flock 1, which makes it a good switch to add to your list!

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Hey AJ,

Sorry to hear that you're thinking about abandoning Flock. Obviously speed is really important when browsing, and I can understand your frustration if you're experiencing slowdowns.

Your speed issues are definitely NOT caused by our anonymous collection metrics...this won't affect your browsing experience.

There are a few things we can do to try to increase performance in Flock, but the first thing I'd actually recommend is what James mentioned, trying the Flock 2 Beta (one), which is powered by the same technology as Firefox 3. Flock 2 is significantly faster, and you can read more on it (and download the beta) at http://www.flock.com/beta/download/firefox-3-pe...

If you do try the beta, PLEASE back up your profile. There are some issues in the beta with favorites not transferring, which will be fixed in Beta 2.

I hope this is helpful and you'll stick around. We want to make your browsing experience as great as possible, and I certainly don't want performance to be the issue holding you back from Flock.

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Hey Suezanne,

We are definitely already deep in the process of moving Flock to the Firefox3 codebase, which includes the zoom, the performance, and all the other great innovations in Firefox3.

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Hey Steve,

Cool feature idea for the Blog Editor, but probably not a big enough audience for us to concentrate on that. Hopefully an enterprising developer will take that idea and the documentation at http://developer.flock.com and create it!

No worries about the People sidebar, I just wanted to make sure you had discovered one of my favorite features! :)

Flock'n'roll,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Thanks for the Flock love, Loki! You rock! :)

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Hey Loki,

It may be called "preferences" on ubuntu...

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Thanks for the great writeup, glad to see you're enjoying Flock so far! A few things I wanted to touch on:

Social network integration: We actually have a very key feature in Flock called the People sidebar. I suspect you never got a chance to look at it, as it solves the SNS integration you're asking for. The People sidebar should pop open automatically when you log into Facebook, Flickr, Twitter or YouTube. If it's not, let me know: that's a bug.

Search engine: You can change the default search engine by dropping down the search flyout (the arrow on the right side of the search box) and choosing Search Preferences. Then just change the default search to whatever you'd like.

Using Flock vs Firefox: Obviously we like Firefox, which is why we built off of that platform. You touched upon the difference in your post...Firefox is concentrated on a great, sleek core browsing experience. Flock is focused on bringing all your social networks and media to you in a way that is totally integrated. Plugins for Firefox are great, but they can often cause performance issues and they rarely interact. One of the best things about Flock is that you can send things from the Feed Reader to the Blog Editor, share photos from the Mediabar with friends in the People sidebar, etc.


Lastly, I just wanted to make sure you're aware that the Flock 1.1 beta stores your data in a special data folder, rather than the folder that official releases do. This means that when you upgrade to the general release of Flock 1.1, it will no longer access the data you created in the beta. That data is NOT LOST, and if you want help getting it into the general release, let me know. :)

@Captain Serek: Flock 1.1 is still in beta, so you won't get an automatic update for a few weeks...we're not quite ready to launch this officially yet.

Flock on!

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Hey Phil,

Thanks for the honest review, we always appreciate feedback. I have a couple of comments below.

Bookmarks: Glad to hear you're enjoying this, I don't get to read feedback about this feature much! :)

UI: Everyone has different tastes. :) We'll be putting a Flock theming document up on our developer wiki (http://developer.flock.com) in the next week and unleashing interested themers on it. Hopefully we will have some alternate themes in time for that late 2007 timeframe.

My World: We definitely have a lot we can and will do to this new feature. Sharing is high on the list, as is more customization.


I'm guessing, based on your review, that you tried out Flock 0.9 (the main, public download on our website). If so, I'd urge you to take a look at our Flock 1.0 beta (now publicly available at http://www.flock.com/RC3). We've made a number of changes, the most significant being the People sidebar, which I feel truly lives up to the integration benefit we've been talking about for some time. I hope you'll check it out; I'd love to see your unbiased review of 1.0!

Flock on,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Hey folks,

Anonymous has it right: Flock can be developed for/on just like Firefox can be. We have a fantastic community of developers and non-developers (http://www.flock.com/community). Many Firefox extensions already work in Flock. And we're currently working on enhancing our developer documentation and tools (http://developer.flock.com) to make it even easier for third parties to integrate other services into Flock. We have no interest in being a walled garden...we're all about bringing the fragmented social web together.

If you'd like more info, visit the above link or drop me a line at flock dot com.

Great conversation, for the record...Flock aside, the future of these scattered social networks and webapps is something I find incredibly intriguing and complex. Things only get more interesting from here.

Flock on,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Hey Jameson,

Sorry to hear that you're not sticking with Flock. Just so you know, most Firefox extensions do work with Flock. Save a few that just plain don't work, most should work or pop a warning and then work. They may affect the performance of the browser (just as they do to Firefox), but they should work.

Have a good night,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Hey Josh,

Glad to hear that you're enjoying Flock 0.9! Looking forward to seeing what you write about it after a few weeks of use.

Regarding email integration: what clients are you talking about? We're looking into webmail, but I'm not sure there is even an easy way to connect with a desktop email program. Let me know.

Flock on,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Hey Paul,

Sorry to hear that Flock 0.9 is not sitting well with you.

Regarding extensions: Flock is a browser and not extensions for two major reasons. First of all, extensions are (from what we've seen) only used by less than 10% of Firefox users. Secondly, one of Flock's biggest draws is the integration between features. You drag'n'drop photos from our Mediabar to our Web Clipboard to use later, send articles from our feed reader directly to our blog editor, etc. It's very hard to achieve integration like that with extensions.

Regarding performance: I'm really sorry to here you ran into performance problems. As we're built off of Firefox 2.0 we do inherit all associated performance issues and have our own. I would be curious to find out if you have any extensions installed...extensions can be performance hogs on Firefox and Flock. That said, we are concerned enough with Flock's performance that we have a whole team spending dedicated time on this issue for our 1.0 release. If you don't stick with 0.9, I hope you give us another look then.

Thanks for the feedback!

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Thanks for the Flock love! Expect a new version in 7-8 weeks.

Flock on,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Cruisin' for an invite.

evan at flock dot com