Digitally Disillusioned

So I’ve been test driving Flock tonight. If you don’t know what Flock is I don’t blame you. I’d imagine that unless you were on the cusp of social networking (and if you are you have my condolences) that you’ve never heard of it. Here is how the company behind Flock describes themselves:

Flock is a consumer Internet business which has developed a free, next generation web browser. The web, and the way people engage online, has evolved dramatically over the past decade. But web browsers - the application that fundamentally enables online experiences and services across ones’ connected life - have not kept pace.

Flock is focused on fundamentally evolving the browser, bringing a refreshing new approach to how people use and participate on the web and simplifying social and web-based applications by bringing them one step closer to the user and integrating them directly into the browser.

When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.

Note that to get the above section blockquoted I had to use the source view in Flocks editing panel as it doesn’t have a blockquote button, and I ALSO had to paste that text through a text editor to drop all styling. If you’re going to carry text style along with the clipboard you NEED to have “paste and match style” as an option. Sigh.

So whats my first impression? Its a version of Firefox drowning in extra features. Some of them are cool, some of them are less cool, and all of they are dense in IA and for the most part badly explained. I’m not a huge social networking butterfly so I get that some of these features are flying right over my head, but let me explain what I’ve used so far.

The people sidebar allows you to converge multiple social networking tools into one. Facebook status updates appear next to Twitter updates - these being the only two services I’m using, Youtube and Flickr also being supported. The very first thing I notice is that there is no way to see peoples full status. Its fixed to one line that quickly fades into an ellipsis . If you mouse over there is a tooltip that comes up with it all, but boy oh boy does that suck for browsing the past few hours of updates at a glance. You know, sure it is in the bulk parsing of status updates that it looks really bad, but it pretty much sucks to view even one status change with this.

I apparently need to go to the Twitter subpane to clear the “new message” notification. This kind is annoying, but also sucks as clicking to clear it also loads the Twitter page in the browser. Also, it always reports 9+ new notifications, so its obviously not quite understanding what Twitter is doing. Or I’m not understanding what it’s telling me. But I’m pretty sure it’s the former.

Flock also has some sort of wacked out local home page filled with social networking tools. Columns are Favorite Sites, Favorite Feeds, and Favorite Media, all three being filled with a bunch of shit I’ve never used/seen in my life. I think it’s doing that thing where its filled it in with helpful hints to lead me to the promised land, but it totally forgot to extend a helpful hand in leading me towards customizing this information to things I actually like. When I finally figured out how to do it, each column features different UI widgets built into Flock to organically construct the list based on things I’ve done online. I guess thats kind of neat, but it still needs a traditional editor, you know, to get all this shit you prepopulated my page with out.

The only other thing I’ve tried to do with Flock is this blog post. I don’t have any interface widget to create the MORE… jump (I added it in Wordpress afterwards), and it will only add images I have a HTTP address for. So I’ll never be using this interface to write a blog post again.

The rest of the features?

• Twitterific does a way better job handling tweets.
• The Facebook website is pretty hard to beat - especially with how the regular and mobile versions blend.
• I didn’t even try the integrated photo sharing capabilities because proprietary iPhoto plugins are pretty much impossible to beat.

  I did kind of like the integrated imagestream viewer though.

So two things will happen now. First, ‘m not going to uninstall Flock, even though I want to. And second, I’m going to look for user stories of people who like Flock because I sure would like to know what kind of person that is.

I am reaffirmed once again that I think the internet works best when you pick and choose from the applications and services out there. Attempts like Flock, which reminds me of the Facebook “platform”, are foolish ideas providing convergence where convergence is not needed or desirable. Indeed, Flock is itself a “platform” to which you can integrate your social networking tool. I highly doubt Flock will ever get enough traction to motivate sites to do that, although I anticipate a healthy homebrew movement will keep it afloat for a while. But of course the assumptions and nuances that come in with each site that is integrated only compounds the UI nightmare that is the Flock interface experience.

In the end I’d recommend skipping Flock. You may find it a novel little utility, but nerds will find it too generalized and plain folk will find it too hard to use.

Blogged with Flock