Daryl’s Flock Blog

Things I’m working on

I’m 100% focused on web site revamping right now. In the mean time, Chris, who’s long had lots of great ideas for community, is going to be thinking about other community stuff so the torch doesn’t get dropped.

Things I’m thinking about 

I’m still thinking about all that other stuff I’ve been thinking and writing about. Whether I’ll be pursuing these things or whether we’re indefinitely shuffling roles with respect to community isn’t clear to me yet.

Did you know that there’s somewhat of a demand for “Pet Chicken” meetups? There are as yet no Flock meetups, however. At $12 a month to host a meetup, I can hardly blame people for not starting any up. I do wonder if there are any small groups of people who meet up to talk about Flock or even about browsers generally. I’ve had several online encounters with Perry Nelson, who happens to live in Knoxville, but we’ve never met. He’s dug up at least one other guy in our area, and we’re looking into meeting up after Flock’s next release in a week or two. If you’re looking to make local connections, you might start at the frappr map that was created a few months ago. If you’re not on the map already, consider adding yourself.

If Flock were to fund a few meetups, would you attend? How many people from your area do you think a meetup would attract? What would you do at a meetup?

The biggest problem with my inaugural podcast, to my mind, is that it was mostly just me talking. To help remedy that for future editions, I’d like to experiment with having sort of a community talkback edition or segment from time to time. Here’s the idea: I ask a question or try to provoke some thoughts; you respond in some audio format, and I incorporate relevant, reasonably well-done responses into a podcast that features the community much more heavily than it does me. This may not work out, but let’s give it a shot. The first question I’ll ask is why you think it makes better sense for Flock to be a browser rather than a set of extensions (if in fact you think that’s the case; if not, explain why not). If you’d like to participate, send to daryl at flock.com an email with the following parts:

• Subject: “podcast opinion 1″
• Your name as you’d like to have it read if I include your response (with pronunciation hints if they’re likely to be needed)
• Your web site if you’d like me to announce it with your answer
• Link to an mp3 of your response (I’d prefer this to your attaching the mp3 if you can manage it)

I propose not less than about 30 seconds and not more than maybe 2 minutes for responses. Your response becomes property of Flock, you’re not entitled to any compensation for it, and all that other legal mumbo jumbo. Here’s hoping five or six people will respond. If not, I guess this is a wash. I look forward to hearing what our community can come up with.

With some helpful tips from community member danakin, I’ve finally produced the first of a series of podcasts I’ve been thinking for months about putting out there. You can tell I’m not a professional at this stuff, as there are lots of umms and uhhhs in there, and the editing’s not terribly smooth, but I’m new at this, and things can really only get better from here. The first edition’s mostly just me talking about things our flockstar crew already knows about, but in the future, you should look to hear from some of the Flock development crew and from some of the flockstars. Hopefully I’ll manage to incorporate some other interesting content as well. If there’s anything in particular you’d find interesting, drop a comment here and I’ll see if it’s doable.

I have once again to thank Tara Hunt for an interview I’ve sampled in the podcast that I paraphrased here a few weeks ago. I also thank Enric at Determining Media for kindly allowing me to lift that excerpt. If you like the music I selected, be sure to check out CHHN over at opsound.

Things I’m working on

• New flock.com and extensions site
• Podcasting (I hope to find time to do interviews with a number of our staff when I visit Flock HQ in a couple of weeks)
• Working with contractor about making mailing list/forum integration smoother
• Bugzilla enhancements
• Planning larger Flock community vision (this is an umbrella item containing things I detailed last week such as themer/localizer/developer tools, PR tool, spread/promote initiative, etc.)
• Community dashboard

Things on my mind 

• Flockstar spotlights (thanks, Lloyd, for doing one yesterday)
• Flock Camp
• Swag
• Weekly-ish team seminar publishing
• Bubbling up community contributions
• Helping developers contribute code

A representative of the Portland User Interface Special Interest Group contacted me about the event described below. I won’t be able to attend, but I believe Chris will be there to field questions and talk a bit about Flock. The coordinator has offered to provide a transcript of the event if possible as well.

Please join us this evening at 5:30pm for an online meeting where we review a state of the art web browser competing for your attention called Flock.

Note: This meeting will take place remotely, i.e. from your office desk/chair, a web browser and a phone…see details below.

Guest company: Flock ( http://www.flock.com/)

Date: THURSDAY January 12th, 2006
Time: 5:30pm- 7:30pm PST
Venue: **Web Meeting/Conference Call**
Web Portion: http://www.readytalk.com/ passcode: 9789183
Audio Portion: 1-712-580-1100 passcode: 9789813
Cost: No cost ( Register to attend) -Register if you have not already done so in the past.
Details: Please welcome this month’s guest, Flock, as they present the developer release of their next generation Web browser that incorporates social networking type features and “ Web 2.0” functionality such as sharing, blogging, tagging and more.

Flock is seeking to redefine the browser experience. Flock views the current state of web browsers as inadequate for participating in the rich interactive co-creation and consumption of content and media that the web affords. To fuel this vision, Flock is creating a new open source web browser that for once accomodates sharing, direct weblog publishing, and new information tracking (”social bookmarking”) techniques now becoming mainstream (e.g. Yahoo! buys (Social Bookmarking service) del.icio.us).

Why is this session important? If you have a novel or new product, technology or solution, you will benefit from the discussion about user adoption, new paradigm shifts with users and overcoming barriers to discoverability, intuitiveness and emotional appeal.

What is the UI-SIG:
The Portland User Interface Special Interest Group is a group of professionals focused on the user experience. We meet to provide complimentary usability feedback to selected local businesses or non-profit organizations.

Who should attend: Anyone who has an interest in understanding the strategic value of usability as relates to marketing and design strategy on your website, software application or product. The group is attended by senior managers, marketing, development, consultants and usability specialists.

I made a quick list today of about 20 things that jumped immediately to my mind as largish projects or ongoing tasks I’ve been cogitating on or actually doing for the past few months. Not included among them were things like “uh oh, spend half a day dealing with weird sysadmin duties unexpectedly” and “reformat hosed laptop and wrestle with drivers to get Linux running on it again” and “help with research and copywriting to get some of our remote people into America on a semi-permanent basis.”

Twentyish things are a lot of things to manage if you’re doing both the management and in many cases the production, and I’ve decided I could use a little self-imposed direction and accountability. I tend to work from task lists scrawled down on yellow legal pads and transferred (the parts that need transferring) from page to page each day. Doing this works pretty well for day-to-day work. That is, for finite, few-hours tasks that can be checked off the list after a day or two, this process is fine. What it’s not so great for is keeping the bigger picture in mind. My job is a constant struggle between trying to find time for the big planning things and actually executing the things I do actually manage to plan. For a month or two now, I’ve had a big scary item on there called “Planning” with a few slightly smaller but equally scary umbrella bullet points underneath it. I figure that there’s no hope of any of those getting checked off the list unless I build a little more accountability into my process.

I’ll continue to use my beloved yellow legal pads to track my day to day work, but I plan to take a page from the book of Lloyd and experiment a bit also with publishing some of what I’m doing. I hope this will provide some incentive for me to knock things off the list in addition to keeping the community at least marginally informed about what’s going on and keeping my compadres over in California (did you know I’m in Tennessee?) in the loop about what I’m doing on a daily basis (besides, you know, sipping pretty cocktails while easing through my two-hour workday).

The format I’m thinking today I’d like to try is to represent what I’ve actually been working on for the period the WIP covers (I can’t imagine these’ll be daily) and what I’d like to be working on or feel as if I should be working on but can’t for whatever reason. I hope this’ll provide a picture of what’s actually going on and what’s hopefully on the horizon. So, without further ado…

What I am doing (lately)

• Working with contractor about making mailing list/forum integration smoother. (This has been in the hopper for a while now, but the holidays intervened and got us off track.)
• Attending meetings and doing some work pertaining to the redevelopment of flock.com in the near future.
• Part of that includes getting something up and running to deal with extensions a little better than we’re currently doing.
• Some sysadmin related to new hires and to a bugzilla enhancement project we’re in the middle of.
• The aforementioned bugzilla project management, which admittedly doesn’t take much management.
• Engaging with people in the forums and irc and the mailing lists and individual email. (These are pretty much standard activities that can take as much as a few hours a day. I think it’s pretty important to be accessible to the community, and to be honest, I probably spend more time just shooting the breeze with people in irc than is ideal from a productivity standpoint, but part of our culture is that we’re friendly/social, so I don’t feel too bad about being a little more social than I might be at another job. Please pass me another pretty cocktail.) (This also is something that goes into the “what I’d like to be doing” category, though I won’t relist it there.)
• Blogging about various things, including some of the big planning stuff that’s been pretty elusive/oppressive lately.
• Writing up some documents to back up the big planning stuff. There are preliminary Gantt charts involved. It’s not pretty.
• Community dashboard stuff to help us gauge how people are using the tools we’re making available. More on this in the coming weeks, I hope.

What I should be doing (lately and in the near term)

• Podcasting. I’d love to develop enough content to come up with a pretty regular podcast. What would you like to listen to?
• Community dashboard (I know I mentioned it above; it’s something I’ve been working on that’s sort of on hold for now, though.)
• Flockstar spotlights. I need to get these back on track.
• Flock Camp. I’d like to plan some of these. Who’s got ideas about what would constitute a helpful Flock Camp?
• Swag. People want it; we need to figure out a good way to deliver it.
• Figuring out how to non-manually bubble up people involved in the community. The dashboard may help with this.
• Work with Lloyd and others to find a good way of publishing some more-or-less-weekly team seminars we’ve started having.
• Deploy tools for localizers.
• Deploy tools for themers.
• Deploy tools for extension developers.
• Communicate to client developers how best to contribute code.
• Get better acquainted with the wiki.
• Deploy a PR management tool I wrote two months ago (still pending some design feedback).
• Start thinking seriously about spread/promote infrastructure.
• Plan more stuff.

There’s more that I should be doing, but these are some of the things on the short list I’ve been staring at (and in some cases chipping away at) for weeks. Now that I’ve got it listed out, I don’t know that I’ll continue this format. It’s too daunting! But now you know some of the things on the horizon, and that helps put some pressure on me to get some of them done. I do hope I can manage to post an occasional WIP entry (maybe once a week or so) to demonstrate some movement on these things. If you ever run into me on irc and are curious about what’s going on with respect to community initiatives, don’t hesitate to ask.

Having now gotten more or less back in the swing of things after my longish holiday, I hope to clear aside some of the day-to-day, in-the-trenches sorts of things I frequently find myself working on and devote some more time and thought to the bigger picture with regard to community. It will pay first to establish some very high level goals for the Flock community. I think they should include improving the product, helping users with the software, and promoting the product. Each of these top-tier goals can be broken down into a number of secondary-tier actions, each of which can be broken down into projects. Outlined below you’ll find a first draft listing of some of these second-tier actions for each top-tier goal. What am I missing here? Or for that matter, am I missing any obvious top-tier goals? Later, we’ll get into more detailed planning. For now, I want to make sure I’ve got the big picture more or less pegged, and I’d like your help. Please comment here or email me at daryl at flock.com withou your thoughts on the outline draft.

Improve the Product
Improving the product from a community standpoint includes (at least) the following:

• Helping volunteer developers contribute to our core source code.
• Helping extension developers learn the platform.
• Putting artists and developers together to make extensions fit with our brand and generally have more polish.
• Giving the L10n community tools to facilitate their work.
• Helping theme developers produce good Flock themes.
• Training people to help write good bug reports and otherwise contribute to QA.

Help Users
Most users off the street have a very limited focus. They want to know what Flock is, what advantage it provides, and how to get help when they’re having problems. To that end, we should make sure we take care of our users in the following ways:

• Clearly communicate Flock’s purpose (e.g., explain why we’re not just a bunch of extensions)
• Make sure they know where to go for different types of info
  • Wiki for documentation/dev questions
  • Forums for community interaction and some bug reports
  • Feeds for news
  • Mailing lists for updates/interaction
  • Extend for themes/extensions/etc. We should try to help users figure out what extensions are going to work best for them. Grandma probably doesn’t need to be directed to the web developer extension, nice as it is.
  • IRC for camaraderie and interaction with dev crew
  • Bugzilla for savvy users who want to know about product status and particular bugs
  • Bleeding edge resources such as tinderbox builds
• Provide friendly tech support, both community-driven and company-driven (?)

Promote the Product
As our product matures, we’ll want to leverage the community to help promote it. Promotion includes not only spreading positive word about the product but reacting sanely and politely to bad PR about Flock. We should provide tools to facilitate both behaviors:

• Call attention to good and bad PR for appropriate response.
• Introduce the product to new users.
• Reintroduce new versions of the product to old users and convince them to try it out.
• Provide freeish advertising (swag, artwork, banners, blogging, etc.).

To the extent possible, all behaviors on community members’ parts to help achieve these goals should be rewarded or recognized. Coming up with a non-spammable and meaningful way of doing this is a task for another day.

Ferrite, the author of the online (as opposed to the desktop) tool that makes Firefox extensions work with Flock, has written a search plugin that makes the process even smoother. Once you’ve installed the search plugin, you select it and then just drag an extension link (ie, a .xpi file) into the search box. Flock’d converts the extension on the fly and provides a link for you to download the converted extension from. So if there’s an extension you’ve been wanting that no one else has ported and you just haven’t felt comfortable porting it yourself, this takes most of the pain out of it without requiring that you install another desktop application to do it. Very cool stuff.

A few weeks ago, there was some discussion among the Flock staff about missions or general goals for Flock. It wasn’t anything official. It was just casual discussion about what some of us thought might be good things for us to keep in mind as we move forward. A few of the stated goals follow, and they’re pretty similar, which means we’ve got some birds of a feather in our Flock, which makes sense.

• to build a publishing platform for the web that subverts hierarchy and puts control back in the hands of the individuals on and offline.
• to help make open source software so appealing and easy that people choose it over the products pushed by the robber barons.
• to build the next great web browser the browser that’s not just about finding information, consuming it, and transacting, but puts talking back to the web and sharing information on an equal footing.

Last night, Bart sent a note to the flock-dev list that helped me to think a bit about what I’d like to see Flock become. I had avoided the earlier lofty mission statement discussion because I tend to be more of a trenches guy than a big vision guy. But Bart’s email prompted me to think about my wishes for Flock in very concrete, pragmatic terms. He proposed that Flock should be fun to use, and I objected on the grounds that such talk was marketspeak barren of any real meaning. Producers of 79-ladders-in-one ladders and the Flowbee and similar “As Seen on TV” products pitch their merchandise as fun to use, when there’s really nothing terribly fun about what the products do. It’s empty marketing filler that advertisers figure will seep into middle-of-the-night viewers’ consciousnesses because it’s a pretty harmless and forgettable statement. I argued that there was nothing implicitly fun about using a browser, and I don’t think there should be or that we have concrete plans to implement any such thing. It’s the content accessed through a browser and not the browser itself that stands to be fun. Bart explained that what he was really trying to get at was that we should provide a polished experience, that our product should be a joy to use, much as (many contend) Apple products tend to offer polish and elegance. And that seems on the surface to be pretty reasonable.

But I’m not sure I actually agree completely. I think Flock should strive to be invisible rather than actively enjoyable. We can best enhance users’ experience of the web by not intruding on the experience of using the web.

I constantly find myself trying to wrestle software into submission rather than using it to achieve the goals for which it was reportedly designed. In Firefox, for example, if I want to bookmark something, I have to invoke a dialog box that I then have to interact with in order to save a link. I have to perform a minimum of two actions in order to save a link, and I have to face this ugly little chrome window in order to do so. Flock has improved on this by allowing one-click saving of links. If I like a link, I just click the star and move on. My experience of the site in question has not been interrupted by the user interface and I’m a happy user. Another success (in its early stages with room for improvement) is our Flickr integration. I can now treat my photos as objects that can be almost tangibly manipulated rather than as URLs or <img> tags, and I can browse them in a topbar rather than having to navigate to a separate site in a separate tab and copy and paste URLs across tabs.

There are other areas in which Flock to date has been a little less successful. For example, the blog editor started out in a tab, which I found preferable to its being in a separate window as it is in current builds. The Performancing blog editor extension beats both of these options, as it offers a split screen that lets me blog without obscuring my view of the web site I’m blogging about. Rather than having to juggle blog windows or tabs, I can stay on the page I’m reading, invoke the little blog editor, browse elsewhere while blogging if I want to, and minimize the interruption to my browsing. Similarly, the shelf is at present a window that can disappear behind other windows. I find it to be of limited use because I have to dig around behind other windows to find it. I expend time and frustration thinking about how to use the software that I’d rather spend reading or writing the web.

So what I’d like to see Flock become is software that you don’t notice. I want to browse without impediment. I think it’s kind of a fun paradox to try to build a browser that provides a great experience by not being experienced very much itself. This is I think one of the principles behind the original development of Firefox. Its creators sought a browser stripped of all the distracting cruft found in other browsers, and they simplified. The challenge for Flock in my view should be to build a browser that packs the browsing experience extremely full of read/write functionality without becoming an experience in and of itself.

technorati tags: flock, mission