Flock was announced some months ago as a new experience in social software, a browser, based on Firefox, that additionally allows for blogging, tagging through del.icio.us and other social network activities.

I don’t know why there were people expressing anger against Flock in the first place. For sure, the idea is definitely cool, the developers made things right and published public alpha versions and there was quite some coverage at the usual sources in the beginning.

I tried it out by myself but when I didn’t succeed in logging in to my MT account through Flock I gave up. I instantly succeeded with the Performancing blogging tool, though.
In the meantime, there appeared new extensions for Firefox like the del.icio.us extension or the Performancing plugin for blogging within Firefox. In a recently published statement, the founder of Flock commented these developments rather angrily and stated that you might of course use Firefox with duct-tape appended extensions but that this was way below the original idea they had in mind with Flock.

I don’t doubt that the guys from Flock are clever and that they have great ideas and capabilities. But I doubt that they will succeed or even will be able to ship a final product. Firefox is a rather popular browser but it still has more hype than users, I heard rumours of about 15% market share in the US and 10% worldwide. While social software is definitely on the rise both in geeky and rather mainstream flavors I do doubt that a product that does several things at a time will be a mass market success. Some thoughts:

  • Mash-ups of Google maps and address/event/people-based applications are rather successful.
  • SOA is on the rise.
  • The number of plugins for Firefox is constantly climbing.
  • Linux and other -ix based OSes are successful because of the interoperability of many small tools and a significant community of open Source developers.

While there definitely are markets for larger integrated applications with a broad range of functionality, like ERP, PPS etc. the interoperability of applications will become so transparent for the user that he thinks he’s working in one app while he actually works just in a frontend that combines several services. Users definitely don’t like to switch apps back and forth but developers have learned that they don’t need to reinvent everything but rather take advantage of stuff others are providing.

So, in the end, everything that Flock promised will be accomplished either through Firefox plugins or through other means. And more flexible. Today we have Flickr, Del.icio.us and the row of well-known blogging tools. Tomorrow, there’s something new in this realm. Developing new plugins that support applications with an open architecture is definitely easier than adding to a monolithic application. That said, I have read about Flock being open and a community project and all that. Still, what’s the use? I don’t see the specific advantage.