socialmedian: Why Don't You Love Flock?

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Why Don't You Love Flock?

Source: ReadWriteWeb

May 23, 2009

Summary

A few days ago, the social web browser Flock released version 2.5 of their software, integrating Facebook Chat, improving Twitter functionality, and adding a new broadcasting feature called "Flockcast." As we evaluated the upgrade, a thought occurred to us: this browser should be the epitome of everything we love about the social web and yet the company has seen only moderate success. Flock has been downloaded 7.5 times but has just 1.1 million active users. (Compare that to Firefox's 175 million). Is Flock doing something wrong here? Or is the product just too niche to ever see mainstream success?

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New in Flock 2.5

In the latest version of the Flock browser, they've integrated Facebook Chat for instant messaging. You can also drag and drop photos, videos, links, and text right into the chat window. The ability to move media around like this is actually one of Flock's best features - no more browsing for files, everything is drag-and-drop in Flock, including posting media to MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter.

Twitter integration in the new version of Flock h

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Comments (3)

Jim Hickey,

May 23, 2009

One complaint I've heard lately regarding Flock pertains to it being slower than other browsers and it isn't as "upgradable". (Firefox 3.0 was one example given). Personally, I just started using Flock and like it this far.

P0ps,

May 24, 2009

I think it still might catch on with social media producers. It is not mainstream and even social media types are slow to react. Firefox has so much more action on the plugins & addons, we hear about them all the time. When the functions are built-in, they may work better, but they're not as exciting.

As far as performance goes, until the Mozilla-based browsers handle tabs like Chrome does, FF & F are going to be p-a-i-n-f-u-l-l-y s-l-o-w, at least the way we all seem to use them (with 25 tabs open and half of them running real-time apps.)

Greghollingsworth,

May 26, 2009

Couple of issues with Flock. #1, it's a memory hog, #2, the socmed tools it provides are not that unique.

The only feature it provides that I really like is the inline feed reader, which is highly useful and removes the need for google reader. But, there are firefox add-ons that do the same thing. If you really want everything in your browser, you can do most of the same stuff with the Yoonoo sidebar.

All in all, there's just not enough reason to choose flock over Firefox.