Flock Deconstructed
Blake Burris, my friend and Mac podcaster extraordinaire, has a fascinating podcast called CocoaRadio, where he interviews developers of Mac apps. This is a great podcast even if you are not a Mac developer or even a Mac user, as it provides some excellent perspectives on how these applications come about and some interesting stories about the people involved.
On a recent podcast, Blake featured an interview with Chris Messina, lead developer on the Flock team. For those who did not catch the public buildup and subsequent let down that many expressed when Flock released their first developer version in the fall, Flock is a new browser, still in the early stages of development, but with some innovative approaches to how a browser will work.
Although Flock is not a Cocoa app (Cocoa is a new object-oriented development framework for Mac OSX) since it is built on Firefox, the conversation is very relevant to Mac developers specifically, and all those interested in the growing interactivity of web services in general.
Chris talks about how the idea for Flock came about, starting with his early work on Mozilla, and some of his ideas for Flock. One statement Chris makes in the podcast really captures the essence of what Flock is about, in my opinion: he said that Flock “allows you to express things on the web rather than just consume them” and “breaks down the barrier between the browser and websites”. One of the central concepts of Flock is the integration, or convergence, of various web services and web information into a central “experience” that Flock provides. You can not only access, but update various web services like Flickr, 43Things, email, your bookmarks / your del.icio.us bookmarks, your blog, etc. from Flock.
Chris also has some fascinating thoughts on potential revenue models for Flock, models for continual software development for Flock and the concept of microformats and how they can potentially integrate information on your computer and the web.
The Flock public beta should be coming soon, but you can download the developer version from flock.com. I encourage you to check out this great interview, and to listen to the other interviews on CocoaRadio.com.
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