Comments on: Why flock makes sense

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 22:15:29 +0000

Gaurav: I have a full text RSS, perhaps you have the wrong feed.

Anyway, I still think that Flock is try to solve something that is not yet a problem, most blog and Flickr users have their own ways of post and would not want to use yet another tool to get the job done.

By: Gaurav

Gaurav — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 13:51:02 +0000

Yes, I was talking more in terms of developing rich internet applications - which is related but not same as enabling social interaction. Even from that (social interaction) angle, Flock does not appear to be "revolutionary". It makes doing some things like blogging or bookmarking easy. It has decent integration with flickr. I could probably get a lot of it if I installed all the right FF plugins (like you mentioned).

What would be really ground breaking will be if applications can be written to plug into a "social browser" rather than a browser plugging into flickr or del.icio.us. For example, if this mythical uber browser natively supported notion of "buddy lists", "people profiles", "identity browsing", "structured content like blogs, reviews, events", then interesting web applications can be developed which harness the power of this new platform. Each time I view somebody's user profile (on their blog or their orkut or myspace account), this browser would pop up an option to add this user as a contact or something like that. Now I am myself finding it hard to articulate my thoughts but I think what we need is a platform, not just another browser.

The one-way stateless nature of HTTP is of course a discussion in itself. Not having a push model available makes a certain class of applications impossible to develop over HTTP.

Oh btw, please please please enable full text feeds on your blog. Right now I can just see the excerpt in my newsreader and its no fun that way :)

By: rashmi

rashmi — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 02:48:43 +0000

Ah, so you think that Flock does not go far enough. To be honest, I have taken only a brief look at Flock, and am assuming that part of the problem is that the Flock folks have not really articulated what they are building very well (in short - we still don't know exactly where they are heading).

However, your critique seems to be about whether Flock enables the browser for "developing rich internet applications" (did I get it right?), while I was talking more about participation in the social interactions.

They are related issues but not the same.

And your critique is much more fundamental, about the nature of HTTP itself. I wonder what people who think deeply about these issues will have to say about it. No answers, just thinking aloud.

By: Gaurav

Gaurav — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 13:16:16 +0000

I am not sure if we can say that Flock is being built from the ground up to handle the new "read/write" web. I think Flock is still an incremental enhancement to the traditional browser. We need a much more fundamental shift in approach and technology to truly enable the browser as the platform for developing rich internet social applications. The HTTP based Web is fundamentally 1-way and stateless which limits what can be done with it. That said, I find it hard to articulate exactly what this ideal browser/platform should look like. So I will stop here ;-)