Here comes Flock

I was in London this weekend and Monday, giving a talk on the future of science and technology. At the Globe Theatre. To as high-powered a group of minds as I'll probably ever see in my life.

Needless to say, it was pretty intense. And I'm still getting back into my regular life (though I seem to have lost my camera).

As usual, I blogged about the trip, put pictures up on Flickr, and was IM'ing friends while over there. When I wasn't rehearsing the talk, I normally had two or three different social software apps running, am uploading content to at least two (and sometimes three or four) different sites and services, then link between it all.

Can't someone make all this easier?

Someone's going to try. In a few days Flock is going to make its public debut. (Chris Messina has posted some screenshots of Flock to Flickr.) Flock describes itself as a "social browser," which as Wired News explains, means

that the application plays nicely with popular web services like Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us. Flock also features widely compliant WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop blogging tools. The browser even promises to detect and authenticate all those user accounts automatically. It's a clear attempt to be the browser of choice for the Web 2.0 user.

A recent article in Business Week elaborates:

Unlike plain-vanilla browsers such as Microsoft's (MSFT ) Internet Explorer, Flock's browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn't satisfied passively browsing media online.

Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online....

"The Web is not just a library of documents, but a stream of events and people," says Flock co-founder and Chief Executive Bart Decrem. "And people are spending a lot more time sharing on the Web."...

All worthwhile stuff. But, as various people on the del.icio.us discussion group (which, not surprisingly, has a good discussion about Flock, why it might matter, and why it might fail) have asked, why not just download all the various plugins that you can use in Firefox to bookmark, tag, and blog stuff you find online? Flock's answer is that most people don't like downloading extensions, setting preferences, dealing with potential browser instability, etc.. A browser that just has all that built in will be appealing.

Interestingly, there's already some counterbuzz-- before the product has launched. Who says we don't do things fast in Silicon Valley?

Now to the nut graf in the Business Week article:

The most innovative thing about Flock is that it's trying to do away with the notion of "browsing." Co-founder and Marketing Vice-President Geoffrey Arone says the term is an increasingly irrelevant description of what people do online. Essentially, Flock's software is intended to serve less as a window into static Web content than as a customizable conduit for participatory Web services, from Flickr to del.icio.us to the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

This, to me, is a really interesting concept. The metaphor of browsing is one of the most familiar expressions of the notion that the Internet is a space. The idea that the notion of browsing is obsolete, and that social software is playing a role in rendering meaningless our old spatial metaphors for understanding the Internet, dovetails nicely with Ross Mayfield's observations about how kids don't think of the Internet as a thing, but as a verb.

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