Flocking to Ease of Use
Posted on October 21st, 2005
I see there's a bit of hoopla today about the debut of Flock, which is described on Slashdot as "a new browser based on Mozilla Firefox and integrating features like RSS feeds, blogging tools, the del.icio.us social bookmarking and Flickr photo sharing services." A big concern people seem to have is whether it makes sense for Flock to be its own thing, as opposed to being an add-on to the Firefox browser which it is based on. A bigger question for me is whether Flock is really making things easier.
Flock has a getting started page that highlights "13 things you really should try with Flock." Here are the ones that I found significant:
The Star button
You need to know about del.icio.us and have an account to take full advantage of this feature. Which is all well and good-after all, tons and tons of people have made del.icio.us the créme-de-la-créme of bookmarking services-but if you're one of the ones that don't, you miss out. It falls to the user to "link" del.ico.us with Flock.
It could be simpler if Flock could handle more of the del.icio.us link transparently, maybe by incorporating parts of the signup process. Then it would be more like "Flock bookmarks powered by del.icio.us" instead of "Flock plus bookmarks from del.icio.us but if you're in the know and have hooked things up properly".
Favorites Manager
This brings bookmark management and aggregator functionality together into one screen. Score!
History Search
Flock indexes the contents of pages you visit with a Lucene-based local search engine. So if I'm on news.google.com and fail to notice a couple stories about Sony that I would otherwise want to read, the next time I type in "Sony" in the search box a menu will pop up indicating that it was mentioned on news.google.com. Score!
Unfortunately this search is local, meaning that my browsing history is not location independent the way bookmarking can be. That's too bad. In the same way that it's awful handy to bookmark a site from one computer and then fetch that bookmark from an entirely different computer (home versus work, for example), it would be handy to have global browser history (I wrote about that in 2003).
On the other hand, that's easier said than done.
Blog This! and The Shelf
The latter seems like the stronger feature. In the Slashdot comments I read, a couple people were crooning about it. I could see this being very handy under certain circumstances, like when you were writing something that attempted to summarize several viewpoints and needed relevant quotes from all sides. You pull all your quotes onto the shelf, then incorporate them into your writing. That's definitely simpler than flipping back and forth between a lot of tabs.
Wouldn't a word processing document be able to do that job? Say you were writing a report of some kind rather than a blog entry. You might still go through the same collection and integration processes, but you wouldn't necessarily chafe for a special UI to help you do it. Copy and paste is pretty much all you need. Flock seems to be smart about formatting, so that's one point in its favor.
I think the answer to the simplicity question I posed at the beginning of this entry is, i depends. If you're one of the people who use major services like Flickr and del.icio.us and also use one of the popular blogging tools like WordPress, then you stand to gain quite a bit from Flock. I think the Slashdot commentary was accurate in essentially saying, That's nice and all, but what's the big whoop? That view probably comes from people outside Flock's best-case users. I fall into that camp myself.
Still, it was interesting to take this extended look at Flock because it's a bundle of several different interesting features. The primary ones aren't exactly must haves to me, but some of the supporting features are drool-worthy. And in general, I think you can avoid a lot of unnecessary complexity if you tackle the simplicity question early on-- does X make my life easier? Really really easier?