What the hell is Flock?

I just saw this on Slashdot today:

daria42 writes "The much-hyped Flock, a new browser based on Mozilla Firefox and integrating features like RSS feeds, blogging tools, the del.icio.us social bookmarking and Flickr photo sharing services has just launched a public developer preview to the world. Flock is being driven by a team of developers being led by Bart Decrem, a well-known open source developer who co-founded the ill-fated Eazel project back in 1999 and has been involved with both the Mozilla and GNOME foundations. On his blog this week he says Flock won't be forking the Firefox codebase."

Slashdot | Firefox-based Social Browser Flock Launches

So I went to the Flock site.

Our code couldn't wait any longer to be free!

But! This preview ain't for the faint of heart! If you're the bleeding-edge type and don't mind a few scrapes and busted knees from time to time, feel free to give it a whirl.

We've got interesting ideas in this thing. We want to know what we've done right how we could improve. And we've got a lot of work ahead of us!

So if a bucket of source code and developer binaries sound enticing, head over to our Developer page now.

Flock

Ok. But the website doesn't explain what the hell thsi thing is, so there was only one thing to do: download and install.

Its apparently just a heavily modified version of Firefox, built around social blogging and stuff. Weird. Whatever. I'm posting this using the builtin blog editor, though. There's not a lot of options here, to be honest. The AJAX-based Blogger posting system seems a little bit better.

Here's some amusing quotes from Channel9 and Slashdot:

It looks pretty, but I'm not sure what the hell it is or its supposed to do. They don't explain it on their site, either.



Worst marketing ever. =D

Flock, who's gonna use it?

Re:cutting edge?
(Score:5, Insightful)

by TeacherOfHeroes (892498)
on Thursday October 20, @11:07PM (#13841874)

Every once in a while someone makes a +5 Insightful comment about how there should be a version of Firefox with the more popular extentions built in so that the average user gets more functionality and doesn't have to do all the work themselves.

Finally someone does it, and people are quick to start belittling it for not being something fantastic and earth shattering. It said straight up that it was based on Firefox.

It's not doing anything nasty like Netscape did, so this just means that there are more alternatives out there. Last time I checked, that was considered to be good around here.

Slashdot | Firefox-based Social Browser Flock Launches

I could see this being extra handy if I blogged more options. We'll see what happens.

(two minutes later, and I'm still trying to figure out why Flock won't post to my blog even though it autodetects the settings.)

I've just given up on getting Flock to post it and just cut-pasted the HTML code directly into Blogger's interface. *shrugs*