Upcoming: Flock with Chris Messina, et al

Chris Messina and I are working out the timing for a recording on Flock,  the not-so-Cocoa project you've likely been reading about and possibly beta testing. Chris and others from the Flock team will be joining me on this interview.

If you're not up to speed on Flock, Wired has a good overview.

Since I named this show "Cocoa" Radio, I am taking the liberty of bending my rules ; ) It's not like it's a special episode on .Net or something! I hope no one loses too much sleep over this. Rather, I hope you enjoy hearing from a quintessential tech startup in Palo Alto where all the dressings of Web2.0 are in the air.

Another motivating interest I have in talking with Flock is that several Mac developer guests have pointed out the opportunities at the intersection of web applications and the desktop. Think FlickrExport for iPhoto, mashups, etc. I hope Flock sparks some creative ideas for new Cocoa apps.

Most Half according to Lloyd Budd of the Flock team tote Powerbooks and released Flock on Mac, Linux, and Windows simultaneously; granted it is based on Firefox so hold your applause. While the UI is not yet Safari-like or quite so snappy, they're not nearly done. They are flying naked by releasing a .40 0.4 version in the wild, but with the help of the user community, Flock might just become the choice tool for browsing, blogging, and sharing information.

Please post your questions as soon as you can. I may have a short runway before recording.

Technorati Tags: apple, cocoa, Del.icio.us, firefox, flock, mac, paloalto, programming, rss, startup, web2.0, wordpress

Comments

[Blake Seely]

How does the Flock team plan to handle privacy across their various web service components? (Or, what are their thoughts on how a desktop/web2 hybrid can/should/will handle this) For example, Flock stores bookmarks as del.icio.us links - but many users don't want their entire bookmark store visible to everyone via delicious. What should the user experience be like? What are some of the considerations? Flock makes this more interesting because it interacts with several web2 apps - each handling privacy/security in different ways.

[Lloyd D Budd]

"Most of the Flock team tote Powerbooks"
Just left than half ;-) We have almost equal Mac and Linux users, and as expected more of the design team are on Macs, and more of the software engineers are on Linux.

[Blake Burris]

Noted. Thought I'd read that must have just been wishful thinking. Who is the Windows user? Poor guy ; )

[Lloyd D Budd]

> ".40"
The version numbers are 0.4.x, with the current being 0.4.10, and the release being duped "Developer Preview - 0.5pr".

[Horus Dragon]

So far Flock has seen some criticism for not being as innovative as promised. Would you say there are still surprises left to be revealed in the future or that the majority of components are in place and just need to be fine tuned?

[Alf Watt]

As an Open Source developer focused on the desktop software market I wonder how you plan to support your company?

The typical Open Source project is targeted towards enterprise deployment and the acompanying business model is focued on providing support services to business which adopt the software. This model breaks down on the desktop where support is typically provivded by IT or peers and the market perception of Open Source is 'Free, as in Beer'.

With iStumbler I have tried to encourage donations by running a subscription program and found that voluntary payment plans wheren't enough to make the project financially sustainable.

[Dermott Mc Meel]

Social Networking has strong business connotations as well as leisure ones. As the Social (Networking?) browser will Flock develop to allow small private/public business networks to communicate via the Flock browser?

[Michael Menefee]

Okay, a few Q's for the upcoming interview:
1. What's the most difficult thing about hacking an extension on top of mozilla?
2. Why mozilla? Why not KHTML or another rendering engine?
3. Are there any plans to make an extensible architecture to allow "plug-ins"? Or what plans do you have to make it for developers/site owners/etc. to add to your platform? In other words, if it was necessary to go beyond the FF plug in architecture, do you have plans to make it easier/modular for others to do the same?

[Bryan Koylass]

From Wired - "We are not trying to do Firefox with five more features. We are trying to solve a very specific problem -- yet it's a problem commonly experienced by many users".

Very interesting quote and and an admirable goal but based on Flock's feature list it would seem to me that Flock is already what it is trying not to be, 'Firefox with five more features'. What makes Flocks feature set important enough to warrant yet another browser where a plug-in might seem more appropriate? How would you explain what Flock is to someone such as myself who doesn't quite get it?

What are your goals with Flock, do you strive for relatively mainstream acceptance (a la Firefox) or would you prefer to a niche product loved by it's users but relatively unknown?

[Steve Neiderhauser]

Questions for Flock:

1. There's been a lot of hype about Web 2.0. What's the reality?

2. Most Cocoa developers use a framework to speed development. What kind of framework or techniques are you using to speed development?

3. It's suggested that we should build options into products from the ground up so we can respond to the changing needs of market. Consider OS X moving to Intel -- Apple built an option to move to another processor into OS X from the start. What options are you building into Flock?