Dan’s Blog

I’ve spent part of this morning tooling around with Flock, a Firefox variant with improved Web 2.0 support. (Yeah, I said “Web 2.0″. This post is going to be like that. Deal with it.)

Flock is basically a browser built around providing a better, integrated wrapper to blog authorship, link management via del.iciou.us, photo management via flickr, and presumably anything else that provides a public web service/XML-RPC API.

So it’s a pretty cool concept — rather than dealing with 35 different interfaces, multiple sites, etc., everything is always just about 1 click or dragging motion away. It’s currently in a developer / “early adopter” stage (their language, not mine), and so the problem is really that it doesn’t seem to quite work. I can’t, for instance, write this blog post through my copy of Flock. (Bug reported here.)

The coolest part of the program is the fact that you’re really dealing with a desktop application that’s fully responsive, rather than a series of forms. But this is also the most disappointing aspect, as well — the UI is rather counter-intuitive, and often times poorly laid out — to the point where I almost wish that the interface nazis of the GNOME project would jump in and practice their feature-stripping black arts.

Still, as a front-end to del.icio.us (bookmarks automatically propagate to and refresh from your account), it’s pretty cool, and, hopefully, with first non-developer release, a lot of these problems will be fixed up.