Daryl’s Flock Blog

A couple of days ago, I posted an appeal to the women of the Flock community to emerge from the woodwork and let us know they were here. I was looking through my queue of potential blog spam today and found a valid comment. It’s more of a gold nugget, really, and it’s particularly timely given some discussion recently about Flock’s integrated experience as compared to Firefox plus miscellaneous extensions (all kicked off by the by-now notorious if superb Performancing extension).

Tara “Miss Rogue” Hunt authored the comment, which points over to a vlog entry wherein she speaks (apparently spontaneously) with great enthusiasm about Flock (following what I have to confess is a much less inspiring bit of marketing by Bart and Geoffrey). I’m going to take a minute here to paraphrase some of what she said:

When I opened up Flock for the first time, I saw the things I expected to see. There’s the back button and refresh button, and there’s the address bar. Oooh, what’s this star? A button with stars on it, and I like stars. I click it and it prompts me for my del.icio.us information and suddenly I see my del.icio.us links with all my tags. Wow! And then I click this button and I’m suddenly blogging from right here in the browser. I have died and gone to Heaven! And then I see this little dropdown and I can pull down my Flickr photos and drag them into my blog entries.

Seeing the sort of enthusiasm Tara projects for the vision we’re trying to unfold sort of makes all the jabs and occasional bouts with uncertainty worthwhile. Firefox is a wonderful product, and its extensibility is brilliant. And there are many superb extensions out there. As we’ve said many times, however, a big part of what Flock offers is an overall user experience. It’s exciting to think about people opening up our browser and discovering all these neat features with the sort of wonderment Tara displays rather than having to roll their own rather more fragmented experience by hunting around for addons. It seems to me rather like the difference between building your own powerful home computer from components and getting a similar pre-built computer. Many people enjoy building their own or have needs that pre-packaged computers don’t offer. This is a valid position. Many others want a fairly predictable subset of options and lack either the technical chops or the simple desire to build their own.

Luckily, Flock offers sort of the best of both worlds. While offering a polished and well-integrated user experience that’s very appealing to (at least) the blogging set, Flock also comes with the extensibility of Firefox. Like our favorites handling but don’t like the blog tool? Install the Performancing extension into Flock and have the best of both experiences. We’ve acknowledged from the beginning that Flock won’t be for everybody. We’re working toward providing an experience in the long run, however, that will more often than not provoke wonderment and relief in those who try our browser out.

Many thanks to Tara for the testimonial and for chiming up as one of Flock’s female users. Now where are the rest of you? And who else has seen or can provide testimonials that help make the case for Flock as a great total user experience?

technorati tags: flock, community, vlog, testimonial

At close of business today, I’m more or less disappearing for a dozen or so days. Oh, I’ll be around. I’ve already got three Flock phone calls scheduled for Friday, in fact, and I’ll check the forums and email while on my break in order to prevent too big a backlog from forming. But technically, I’ll be on vacation.

What am I doing for vacation? Pretty much nothing. I thought about picking up and traveling somewhere, but I think I’m just going to relax. I hope to catch up on reading (after a month or more of managing a few pages every few nights, I’m all but 100 pages through Gravity’s Rainbow, and if I don’t get Consider the Lobster as a holiday present, I’m running right out and picking it up to feed my healthy obsession with one of the 20th/21st centuries’ absolute best writers), for one thing. And I’ve got a couple of little projects I’ve been putting off for a few months that I might spend a little time on.

Plus I’ll spend lots of good time with my little moppet of a daughter, who turns 18 months old on Saturday and whom you can see pictured here helping string lights up on our holiday tree. We put the thing up in full splendor on Sunday, optimistic that we could keep her from destroying it. Now it has no ornaments on it below about three-and-a-half feet. Ah, children.

I’m crossing my fingers that in my absence, things will hum along pretty nicely on the community front. As I’m just a shepherd who loosely tends the day to day operations, I don’t think this will be a problem. I thought I’d toss a little inspiration out there for good measure, though. When I woke up this morning and started poking through my flockstars email, I read the following in a thread about the apparently controversial Performancing Firefox blogging extension:

The Flock team and quite a few people who’re tagging along have formed a community that’s welcoming people into it and helping to solve problems along the way.

Examples of how the Flock team is doing this include things like Ian’s great post from yesterday in response to a request for Foxmarks integration:

One feature of our favorites system is an API for plugging in synchronization with online bookmarking services! Right now we’ve got
three working ones, plus a skeleton example checked in. I’d love to work with you and perhaps the Foxmarks guys and gals to build a flock extension for synchronizing with their technology.

More important are the ways in which non-Flock-staffers are forming community. Roughly once a week, we feature a flockstar who’s doing great work in the community. A number of people have donated time, bandwidth, disk space, or programming skills to help make extensions available for Flock. Others have done great artwork. Others are doing bug triage behind the scenes. And yet others are helping answer questions in the forums and on the lists. This level of activity in such an early-stage project astounds me. It’s nice that people are interested enough in what we’re trying to accomplish that they’re willing to give their time to us. The beauty of it all, of course, is that much of the day-to-day activity is self-running. Which is why I’m not exactly worried about being away for a couple of weeks. Keep up the good work! When I’m back after the new year, you can look forward to pretty rapid activity on at least the following fronts:

• Public web site rework
• Extensions site
• Improved bugzilla
• Community metrics
• Integration between the forums and the mailing lists

So stay tuned. If you’re inclined to celebrate any sort of holiday during this season, I hope your holidays are swell, and if you’re not so inclined, I wish you general good cheer and prosperity.

technorati tags: holiday, community

So far, all the community members I’ve interacted with in connection with Flock have been, as far as I’m aware, guys. Surely there are some women out there who use or contribute in some way to Flock. Early on, we had the Flock tummy excitement, which spawned the short-lived and frankly mildly disturbing Flock Tummy Wars thread at Flickr. I’m not asking women to show any skin here, but if you’re out there, speak up. We could stand a little diversity in out Flockstar Spotlights.

technorati tags: flock, community

Before too terribly long, we’ll publish a big boring document about trademarks. I read the thing a couple of weeks ago and, no offense to Bart, who authored much of the original document for Mozilla and who tweaked it for our purposes, but it’s not exactly fun reading. We had had a couple of queries about using some of the graphics from our theme (and in one case porting our theme to Firefox), and several of us made some time to discuss the matter last week.

Our theme is a little problematic because a lot of it looks a lot like our logo. There’s nothing essentially Firefoxy about the default Firefox theme, but there is something distinctly Flockish about our nav buttons. And, like Firefox, we need to protect our logo and derived images pretty aggressively in order to preserve our brand. So it was a pretty sticky issue for us, and one not devoid of some contention. But we worked out something that I think is good for the community and for Flock. Full boring details will follow later, but here’s the quick take on trademark as it relates to theme assets, at lest:

technorati tags: flock, community, theme, dev, extend

I’ve been thinking a lot about extensions over the last couple of months because we’re slowly working on getting our extensions site up and running. Thanks to much great feedback on a blog post I wrote last week, I feel reasonably certain we’re going to proceed with some sort of hybrid of several of the listing strategies I proposed. That is, we’ll list pretty much all the Flock extensions we know about, the Flock crew will single some out as especially worth your time, and we’ll devise some way of incorporating community feedback as well.

The big problem with community feedback and ratings is that people have a tendency to try to game the system. Some have suggested that using click counts rather than user ratings is a more accurate measure of how popular an extension is, though that seems as easily gameable as ratings. You can click to download or write a script to elevate click counts as easily as you can do so to add ratings. And whereas you can limit ratings to one per user per extension by forcing a login to rate, you can’t reasonably limit extension download clicks. So I’m not convinced that click counting is the best metric for quality. Nor am I particularly convinced that a simple ratings system is the best route.

I wonder if a more complex rating system might be useful. Consider that in the original feedback request, one of the concerns I mentioned was that we want to find ways of helping improve the quality of extensions. That was in fact part of the reason for our considering featuring only the best of the best, as doing so raises the bar (theoretically, though I’ve always suspected that in practice it would just tick people off) and stands to benefit the community as a whole. So what if the rating system helped us gauge quality in different areas?

Suppose that each extension lets you rate it along several axes. I’ll tentatively propose “works well,” “looks good,” and “has good user interaction” as three such areas. Each one can be rated on maybe a five-point scale from very poor to very good (or strongly disagree to strongly agree). This lets us do a few things. It lets us quantify based on user feedback how extensions measure up in the different areas. This is useful to both users and developers, though it may not always be an ego saver. More importantly, it gives us a basis for helping match developers with graphics or usability gurus. Perhaps there’s an extension whose core functionality is outstanding but is a beast to use. These metrics help developers figure that out based on feedback from people using the extensions. In principle, design volunteers can go looking for high-functionality/low-design extensions and offer their help. The same goes for developers watching for high-design/low-functionality extensions. This setup also makes it a little harder to game the system because it’s not strictly a one-dimensional “good or bad” rating. If an extension developer elevates his numbers by gaming the system, his extension perhaps gets more visibility from a download perspective, but it gets less visibility from a QA perspective and never improves. By elevating all of your numbers, in other words, you reduce the likelihood of getting feedback that’ll help you improve your extension. And I think that most extension developers have honest intentions and relish feedback on their work.

So, these are just a few quick thoughts on one possible way of handling ratings on an extensions site. I’d love to have lots of feedback on what’s right and wrong about this approach. I’d also love to hear ideas for other innovative approaches not only to helping float the best extensions but also to letting the process drive quality and community (ie, pairing designers with developers). Speak up, peanut gallery!

technorati tags: flock, community, extend

I’ve been sort of (I like to think) conspicuously absent from the forums and the blogging world for a week or so. I actually left my home base in Tennessee (yes, we do have computers here, though we’re still working on refining that whole indoor plumbing thing) to spend a few days at Flock HQ. Here you can see me hard at work with Robin and Gandalf (who appears to be giving the camera the evil eye; he’s really a very nice guy). In this meeting, we’re planning our infrastructure needs. Those of us who sort of split up sysadmin duties are lobbying pretty hard for at least a part-time sysadmin. (If you know anybody good, let me know!) I also spent some time with Chris mapping out community sites and did lots of work on an as yet unfinished community dashboard that I hope will help us monitor activity and gauge how well we’re engaging with you guys. I’m sure I did other stuff as well, though I flew largely below the radar from a blogging perspective.

I flew out of San Francisco straight to my parents’ home in North Carolina (they have indoor plumbing there too), where I spent the weekend doing holidayish stuff. My whole family has since taken ill with a nasty stomach virus (hence my silence on Monday), and now I’m trying to catch up. I may be a little scarce at times in the coming few weeks as well, as I may be called upon to help get our mid-January early adopter’s release out rather than rubbernecking with the community. So if you wonder where I’ve been and what’s up with the community or you miss me or just want to send me presents, do drop me a line at daryl at flock.com and I’ll try to send out an update.

In the mean time, I’ve spent some time today trying to catch up a bit on the forums and the community in general, and I found a couple of neat things I thought I’d share. As documented here, one community member has built an OpenSuse build of Flock. Woo hoo! On a similar note, there’s talk on our flockstars list of trying to build .deb packages to make Flock easier to install on Ubuntu systems. I invite any Ubuntu hackers out there to join the discussion or, better yet, to whip out the package and let us know. Another tidbit in the forums that caught my eye was what seems to me like a nifty extension request that would let users map key-bindings easily. It’s probably not the sort of thing that’d ever make it into a core build, but it’s something many users would no doubt find useful, at least for the one or two key-bindings they find unintuitive or simply not available.

On the flockstars list a week or two ago, Neil proposed a few neat topbar ideas that I thought I’d toss out there for the benefit of any enterprising developers with some spare holiday time. How about a Netflix topbar? Or a wikipedia topbar? Or an amazon wishlist manager topbar? Or a package tracking (USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.) topbar? These all seem like great ideas and some of them (or variations) probably fairly low-hanging fruit.

Ok, that’s what I’ve got time for at the moment. In the not too terribly distant future (with any luck), I’ll have updates on extend.flock.com, the community dashboard, a patch process for developers, and a new and improved bugzilla. We have much on our plates besides a simple software release!

technorati tags: flock, community

Our developers put some time recently into writing pieces heading in the direction of a spec. It’s not a polished document yet. Bits of it are redundant and lack consistency. There are whole big sets of functionality not documented. We have a long way to go, and it’s hard to strike a good balance between writing good specs and actually developing the exciting things specs tend to talk about in tedious (if useful) ways. Here, all glommed together in one big honking document, is what we’ve got. Enjoy it, use it to put yourself to sleep at night, bask in the transparency that we’re trying to build into our processes.

technorati tags: flock, community, docs

I’ve always enjoyed the abbreviations the Mozilla community has used. The 14-year-old boy in me gets a kick out of saying MoFo. The amateur linguist in me thrills at the amo abbreviation for addons.mozilla.org, as amo means “I love” in Latin, and this is a fitting expression given that the ability to extend Firefox is one of its most appealing features for many. Although I learned yesterday that Flock has been removed from Firefox’s list of supported applications (at the FAQ), the addons site does have a category for extensions that support Flock. This is great news, as it provides an interim solution to the trust issue I brought up yesterday. These extensions are uploaded by their authors and QA’d by Mozilla folk, so they should be safe and functional. As more and more authors port their extensions to work with Flock, more and more should appear at amo. Big thanks to the crew at Mozilla for showing us some love by listing Flock extensions.

technorati tags: flock, community, extend

Our own Chris Messina was interviewed in the second installment of the new Inside the Net podcast released this week. The first installment featured a great segment on the Firefox 1.5 release. You can discuss the podcast at the thread started in our forums if you’re up for it.

technorati tags: flock, community, podcast

We’re considering several approaches to publishing Flock extensions, and I want to get a feel for what the community thinks of the various approaches. There are two major considerations that pull in opposite directions:

1. Quality. In order to maintain a high-quality brand going forward, it might pay to limit what extensions we bless and associate with our brand. This approach guarantees for users that the extensions we feature are of high quality and provide a unified experience. The approach is exclusive, however, as many useful extensions might not pass muster from an experience perspective. For example, a neat extension produced by someone with limited UI experience or graphics resources might not make the cut. If we take this approach, it will be especially important that we work to provide resources that help developers produce high-quality extensions. If we limit what we feature, we should empower developers to stand a better chance of having their extensions make the cut. If we raise the bar by limiting what extensions we list, we raise the bar for extensions development, which ultimately benefits everybody.
2. Trust. Installing extensions from unknown sources can be dangerous, so it’s important to have an authoritative list of extensions that have been verified to work and not to be malicious. This approach serves the larger user base and supports extensions that are valuable despite a lack of UI polish (for example), but it does so at a potential cost to user experience and thus dilutes the experience we’re working toward providing within Flock.

This is kind of tricky to talk about, incidentally, as it’s definitely not our intention to denigrate the efforts of community developers. It’s just a reality that some developers are better developers than UI designers (and vice versa). We’re juggling here whether to try to enhance the overall experience of using Flock by listing only the best of the best extensions and whether to enhance the extensibility for a broader user base by listing everything under the sky that works with Flock.

It seems to me that there are several reasonable approaches:

1. Feature only the best of the best, period. The community can provide and vet other sites to list extensions, but Flock officially endorses only the best as chosen by the Flock crew.
2. List everything we know of and allow users to drill down and search for all extensions, but emphasize very heavily the best of the best as chosen by the Flock crew.
3. List everything we know of and allow users to drill down and search for all extensions, but emphasize very heavily the best of the best as chosen by the community through ratings, etc.
4. Blend approaches 2 and 3, allowing the community to bubble extensions up but also allowing the Flock crew to emphasize what we consider the best fits based on quality, branding, etc.
5. Just list everything, singling out at most things like recent and most downloaded.

There may be other reasonable approaches as well. This seems to cover most of the continuum, though. So, what do you think? Is raising the bar for extensions development worth possibly alienating some developers (my big concern)? Or is it more important to establish trust, making it easy for users to confidently install any extension that’s known to be safe and to work with Flock? I’d love to hear from both users and developers on this matter. I have a meeting on this stuff on Thursday.

technorati tags: flock, community, extend