Flock First Impressions

First Impression: Nice idea but needs refinement.

Flock, if you haven’t bumped into the hype, is a new &8220;social&8221; browser based on Mozilla.org technologies. Wraps up a bunch of so-called web 2.0 products (flickr, blogging, del.icio.us, feeds) along with your old fashioned view of the web into one user interface.

Missing features aside, it just doesn’t feel natural — yet. A few too many times I’ve either accidentally done something (bookmarking something when i wanted a context menu) or had to work too hard to do something I would have though would be seamless in the product. But those things I’ll give some time and user feedback to get worked out.

As for missing features, heres a few initial bugaboos:

• No initial bookmark or other data import from Camino (my normal browser of choice).
• With the del.icio.us syncing features it looks like some of the bookmarking features I’m used to in Camino or Firefox are missing — most disappointing is the apparent loss of bookmark keywords.
• The bookmark integration seems like an all or nothing proposition. Maybe I’m an odd sort but I have many local bookmarks to machines that can’t be accessed by an outside network, private bookmarks to admin interfaces here or there, bookmarklets, or other such things that I wouldn’t want to share with the world. An extra &8220;publish&8221; layer here would be greatly appreciated.
• A feature more of my choice in blogging tools then anything the Flock team could have done, but by using their interface to post I’m not getting access to any preview of my posts run through Textile. Sort of a pain for consistency — especially if I’m moving between the native web interface and the XML-RPC facilities.

On a big positive, the core browser functionality seems as solid as I’ve seen Firefox be, and they haven’t really broken anything on the way to adding the new tools. That’s a real good place to be during these early preview stages and gives them plenty of room to focus on cleaning up the new tools going forward.

EDIT FROM TEXTPATTERN: Well, I guess I need to work on the textpattern integration a bit. Kill the formatting from flock, run textile, and find a way to get category picking working.