Shooting down Flock

Although it’s been a while since the developer preview release of the much-hyped Flock browser, it’s not too late to write on the subject: in fact, it may still be slightly early. I spent a while trying to love Flock myself, but a month later I reinstalled Firefox and came to the conclusion that Flock is a destined-to-die, “Web 2.0″-overhyped Firefox clone with a business model that resembles a dot-bomb more than a Web 2.0 company.

Flock envisions itself as being a “social browser,” that is, they’ve “[integrated] tools that make it easier to blog, publish your photos and share and discover things that are interesting to you.” It’s a quaint, idealistic vision: let’s build something more than a browser. Let’s build the browser of Web 2.0. The thing that Flock seemingly didn’t pay any attention to, however, is that Flock’s parent, Firefox, already did everything Flock does with extensions. If Flock wishes to cry “But Firefox, by itself, offers no integrated social ability, which makes it Web 1.0,” they are missing what makes Firefox actually closer to the social browser than Flock itself. How is this possible? Flock does have social features that Firefox is devoid of in its stock form. One needs to look outside of the narrow scope of the feature set and instead look at how each browser has been marketed.

Then, in the larger perspective, Flock really appears much like the Internet startups in 1999-2000. The dotcom craze was all about this idea of “predictive personalisation:” that is, the examination of consumer trends to marked a product into the heart of that trend. This targeted marketing is how we got awful things such as Netpliance’s iOpener: as an increasing number of people found a use for e-mail and the Internet in their personal lives, it made sense to Netpliance to bring that access into the household in an inexpensive, kiosk-like level. People really used e-mail and Web access; why not make it cheaper and smaller? Why not tailor a device to this increasing usage of casual, at-home web surfing? It made sense on the marketing level. Not surprisingly, the overpriced appliances tanked as more people just bought new PCs, which, although more expensive, were much more extensible and useful. The iOpener was stuck with the Netpliance ISP and the iOpener’s own software applications.

Tons of other notorious dotcoms failed on this same “give the people services to fit the trends in their e-lifestyles” business model: the wireless-broadband provider Metricom (anyone remember those clunky, grey Ricochet modems plastered onto the nearest businessman’s Toshiba Tecra?) is a prime example of this. With only a few people needing the Ricochet service, millions of dollars poured into a proprietary network for niche users destroyed the company. The services of the dot-com era that did survive did so by not following a ride-the-wave model, and instead chose to diversify. When the wave of trendiness returned to the sea, beached dotcoms asphyxiated on the shores of a mean, economically-recessed tech market. Flock is really pushing this same model with their Firefox-clone-with-integrated-extensions, and it’s bound to fly into a cloud of smog and choke itself to death if it, too, doesn’t do something that’s actually revolutionary, extensible, and diverse. Flock jumps onto the current trend bandwagon full-force: Ooh, people are blogging. Bloggers use RSS, del.icio.us, and Flickr. They’re using Firefox. Let’s target that.

The world isn’t what it was five years ago: the Web most certainly isn’t new to the majority of users. We’re not new to this social Web game, either. Our tendencies to float toward extensibility and “custom consumerism” instead of targeted marketing. Spreadshirt allows you to create your own designed T-shirts, simply giving us the base interface and capability to do so. WordPress gives us the capability to post things, but it’s the extensibility allowed by plugins and themes that really add the true power to the system. Yahoo’s Widgets (previously Konfabulator) and Apple’s Dashboard give us that same sort of extensibility on the desktop. With Google’s Personalised Homepage and Protopage, we’re given a basic homepage from which we choose the features most relevant to us. Our favourite Web 2.0 applications are actually just base frameworks that we add our own functionality and content to instead of accepting pre-packaged functionality from others. Why, then, is Flock and its buzz seemingly missing this? Why are we to accept what their vision of an ideal browser is instead of building one for ourselves? What if we don’t want their specific functionality? We’re stuck with it. What if we want new functionality? Even though Flock’s Firefox compatibility allows the use of Extensions, Firefox stock extensions will not work in Flock without changes. Flock, when viewed in this grand social scheme of things, loses a lot of the lustre and social vision that they’re trying to build into it.

How is Flock expected to survive? Unless your vision of integration matches that of Flock’s, I don’t see how it can (aside from buzz and a few niche users.) My vision was different. On the day I reinstalled Firefox, I installed the official del.icio.us plugin, Performancing for Firefox, a few of my favourite search engines, ChatZilla, and DownThemAll. I had my dream browser, the same, familiar browser I had been using since its days as Phoenix. Although I wanted to ride that wave of early adoption again, I had realised that I was going to end up surfing on the sand.

So long, Flock. While we’re trying to live the good old days of trend-targeting and idealistic visions of an abstract definition, let’s raise a glass to NeoPlanet. What the hell is NeoPlanet? You may just find out soon enough.