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It's A Flock, Not A Herd!

I have to admit, the first time I heard about Flock, I said "What, another Web browser?" My skepticism remained high when I learned how Flock was designed to make it easier to work with social Web sites, most of which I never touch. Then I actually tried it out, and within two days I was using it to manage my Flickr account. Within four days it was my new default browser. And with a success story like that under my belt, I picked up the phone and chatted with Flock CEO Shawn Hardin about the whole Flock thang.

My first question came right out of my initial skepticism about Flock: Why create a new browser, even if it's one derived from the inimitable Firefox? Shawn explained that their mission was to take the browser -- one of the applications that we arguably spend the vast majority of our time in on a computer these days -- and use it to make the "social Web" usable, and useful, to people who would normally never think about it.

This whole concept is something I more or less blundered across myself when I fired up Flock for the first time, and found out how my Flickr feed (including all of my buddies therein) was now available as a sidebar right in the browser. The way Shawn put this was to "make engagement and connection as easy as consumption". The most obvious implementation of this is Flock's "My World" homepage -- a kind of dashboard that aggregates all of your activity into a simple view. What's nice about the Flock way of handling this stuff is how it's designed to stay out of your way unless you want it. To wit: if you don't like having My World as your homepage, you can set it to anything else you want, and that's the end of it.

This is all great, but Firefox itself isn't standing still, either, and is taking tentative steps toward adding features like that into its core. What will happen if features in Flock start overlapping with -- shilling for, colliding with -- features in newer versions of Firefox? Shawn's take on that was fairly laissez-faire: if there were feature collisions, they'd be handled on a case-by-case basis, and so far there didn't seem to be very much that overlapped between the two.

How does Flock make money? I asked. Turns out Flock's business model is essentially the same as the Firefox/Mozilla model: revenue from the native search capacities within the browser. Their search engine of choice is Yahoo, which makes sense given that Shawn is an ex-Y program manager, and much to their own surprise this model has not only worked for them but outstripped their own projections.

A big part of what makes Flock interesting to me is how it looks like it's turning into a framework -- or maybe better to say a receptacle -- for the open standards and APIs that are slowly being created as social ways to access the Internet (OpenSocial, etc.).  Even if, as my colleague Alex Wolfe opined, this Social 2.0 stuff in business settings may just turn out to be a new way to suffer death by meeting, Flock's getting itself into a position to make plugging into all of this stuff as much like your existing browsing experience as possible. And doing it out in the open, to boot.

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