The Blog Herald
Now Reading
What the Flock?
The Blog Herald
The Blog Herald

What the Flock?

by
October 24, 2005

Duncan Riley> If you’ve been waiting for some biting commentary from me for a while I’m back with a vengeance because last night I made the mistake of download Flock, and guess what, as I read yet another pile of Flocking hype on the blogosphere this morning I’ve got to ask: What the Flock?

So what is Flock. From what I can gather its Firefox with a trendy looking silver paint job, a shitty blog posting tool, and the ability to post your bookmarks to De.l.ic.o….us… you know the service…the..one..with…a.l.l. the d.ot.s in the name. And apparently you can star stuff as well and “share” it online. Whop-de-flocking-do.

OK, enough of the bad puns but this is what I will say, Flock is highly over-hyped and as much as its an early release I see absolutely no reason what so ever to change from Firefox. A browser is about surfing the web, it ain’t suppose to be a can opener as well.

And business model? Threadwatch has a bit more on this. Pleased don’t get me wrong because I’m sure the guys behind this idea are nice people, and they are bloody brilliant marketers, but I’d think at this stage they’d be better doing a start-up marketing firm called “HYPE INC.” rather than remain in the browser business. Some people will like this browser but sorry, I’m not one of them.

See Also
The Importance of Being Kind to Yourself; And How To Do It
The Importance of Being Kind to Yourself; And How To Do It

Flock: 2/5
Pros: it has Firefox as its engine
Against: its Firefox with some additions I can put into Firefox with some plugins anyway.

View Comments (8)

  • The thought occured to me the day might be coming when we all have our very own personal brand of browser. We’ll all be our own little marketing engines trying to get all our friends to use “our” browser.

  • You hit the nail on the head. Flock has a great name, all the hype with very little substance to back it up.

    I was really disappointed and un-installed it with a sigh.

  • I thought Flock was over-hyped, especially its tie with another over-hyped buzzword “Web 2.0”.

    Then when the developer preview got released, I went to their website, downloaded it, and forced myself to use it exclusively for two days, hoping to find myself proved wrong (after reading praises all over the places)…

    Nah. Two of the least enjoyable days of my life.

    I use social bookmarking (but not de.icio.us). I use on-line photo albums (but not flickr). I blog, but from the app I wrote. Flock has many “good ideas”, but many feel limiting rather than empowering.

    So yeah. Back to Firefox now.

  • I din’t like Flock either. I downloaded it and within 5 minutes it was resting in my “recycle bin”. But i din’t think that it could be “recycled”. So i kicked it from my recycle bin to the lost space of deleted files. :D

Scroll To Top