flock together.”
As you may have guessed from my rather slick introduction, I just discovered Flock, the newest in cool Firefox-altered technology.
It’s basically a slick, modded, Web 2.0 compatible version of the ever so popular Mozilla Firefox browser. Of course, it’s still very much in Beta (Alpha even?), but apart from a few quirks (like not being able to import my Firefox bookmarks), it seems fairly stable.
Now, I’m very fond of software coming from the corner of 37 Signals, WordPress, etc., and Flock seems to be quite attached to WordPress. So much even, that once you’ve installed Flock, you can sign up for WordPress.com, the hosted WordPress service which until now you needed an invite for. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that although I really like how usability and cool are now together at last, I’m still quite uneasy about the whole social software thing. You see, Flock is based on the premise that everyone’s Internet experience would be a whole lot better if they shared their bookmarks via delicious. Now, I do know that it’s not necessary to do that. Flock lets you decide if and what and with whom you’ll share. Still, and I think I wrote about that already a few months back (yep, I definitely did…here’s the post), I am a bit wary when it comes to the whole thing called Web 2.0.
I think it’s great that services like Flickr and del.icio.us and by now countless others offer the ability to share whatever you deem shareable with everyone on the web. But, and I won’t tire emphasizing on that over and over again, I don’t like the idea of storing my photos or bookmarks on some server somewhere in the world. I also don’t like the idea that full disclosure of my bookmarks, is just one (accidental) click away. I think del.icio.us is a great Zeitgeist tool, but I don’t think it should be used as a replacement for local bookmarking.
By the way, I wrote that entry via the ultra-slick, integrated-into-toolbar blogging tool provided by Flock, and I guess once they’ve worked out its kinks, I’m going to use it a lot more often.