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