Word seems to be getting out that we’re releasing an eco edition of the Flock browser for Earth Day. I haven’t tried it myself yet (we’re doing final QA on the build to make sure it’s in good enough shape to release), but I do know that it comes with all sorts of green-related links and feeds built in (it’s not clear to me whether these will be dumped in along with your existing ones if you’re already a Flock user; back up your profile first just in case) and that it has a green theme (complete with a recycle button in place of the reload button, which is kind of nifty).

Flock makes money when people use the search widgets built into the browser to search through Yahoo, and we’re opting to donate 10% of the money we make through this edition of the browser to some green cause (to be determined later by user voting). It kind of makes me think of the free rice game: Play a fun little game and give rice to starving people just by playing. Keep your search engine set to Yahoo and use our product to actually do your searching and save trees at the same time. Who knows? It could be your search for Paris Hilton that enables an ecologist to rescue a baby panda from the clutches of a poacher bent on selling its organs to a far eastern natural medicine dealer.

For nearly three years now, I’ve worked for a company called Flock. For nearly three years, we’ve been working toward releasing a 1.0 version of our product. And yesterday, we finally did it, amid much less fanfare than I might have expected (not even a company blog post). Starting as far back as version 0.5 just under two years ago, I’ve been using Flock as my primary web browser (that’s what we make, a web browser built on the same platform that drives Firefox), so I’ve been around to see all the changes the product has gone through.

Our first public beta was released to much hype with subsequent fizzle. It had a neat skin, a photo viewer/uploader, a rudimentary blog authoring tool, and something we called the shelf, and that was it, besides the basic browser functions. Although we had many early enthusiasts (some of whom are still with us), reactions tended to be along the lines of “this is what the hubbub is all about?”

In June 2006, we released version 0.7 of the browser and saw lots of downloads and a lot of press (I worked 20-hour days for a week to keep the new web site from dying under the strain of our traffic). We were thinking at the time that we’d have a 1.0 version by the end of the year, but change was in the air, and after some executive turnover, the end of the year had come and we didn’t have a 1.0. In the first couple of months of this year, I feel like we really hit our stride and started executing. We pushed a 0.9 version with subsequent updates that got tolerable reviews, and our 1.0 beta releases over the past few weeks have been met with the customary skepticism, but for the first time, a lot of that skepticism is beginning to turn over. People are posting that though they found our product either not compelling or too buggy in the past, they’re loving it now. And plenty of newcomers are saying that they’re addicted.

I’m going to do a little sidebar here on the social web. I’ve always been pretty cold to it. What need do I have to send to Twitter every half hour an update about what I’m doing, or to read in real-time that my social-web-addicted buddies are going out for coffee or sitting through a dull meeting? Do I really want to read another “20 Questions” type post on MySpace? Basically, I don’t often have time or the compulsion to fool around on social networking sites. I spend my day working on the computer and so don’t typically like to spend much time playing on it. A year or so ago, I signed up with MySpace and Facebook basically because my work compelled me to. It was another way for Flock employees to consume our own dogfood, so to speak, and to network with users of these sites who were interested in Flock. But there wasn’t much personal value to me in signing up on these sites. I had a profile but I didn’t use the sites with any regularity.

The latest version of Flock has changed this because it brings the social web to me. The nifty services sidebar notifies me when I have new messages or pokes in Facebook, and it lets me drag content from the web to friends’ avatars to share it with them. I can find individual friends within my network more easily than by using Facebook itself because I can type part of a name in a textbox embedded in my browser to filter my friend list. I can see updated statuses easily, and an icon lights up for friends who have uploaded new media. When I click a person’s media icon, a media bar appears and is populated with thumbnails of their media that I can scan at a glance, clicking through to actually view only the things that interest me. Probably the best thing is that Flock tells me when there are updates so that I engage only when I have a good reason to rather than having to remember and bother to visit Facebook to look for updates. Since I’ve been using Flock 1.0, I’ve been engaging with people in my network, sending messages I wouldn’t have sent and viewing photos I wouldn’t have bothered to view. Flock 1.0 for me is like the Reader’s Digest of the social web. I’d never go out of my way to read a full-length bio of Meredith Baxter-Birney, but if I’m sitting on the can and have read all the jokes in my Reader’s Digest, I might thumb through the RD condensed interview with her, and I might even enjoy it a little.

That’s the main thing that differentiates Flock 1.0 from previous versions for me. I’ve long been a fan of the built-in feed aggregation, and it was Flock’s Flickr uploader (which also works with Piczo, Photobucket, and I believe Facebook) that prompted me a year ago to buy a Flickr Pro account. It previously hadn’t been worthwhile because, as a Linux user, I had no painless way of uploading photos in bulk. Flock also has built-in del.icio.us integration, the aforementioned shelf (now called the web clipboard, basically a little drag/drop area that lets you store dragged items for later use in blog posts), the blog editor, and all the goodness that comes with Firefox 2.0’s underlying engine.

I’m an employee of the company, of course, and so I have a vested interest in our success. But I really really do like the product and would use it for the built-in feed reader even if I weren’t an employee. (I’m not only the president of the hair club for men…) I suspect that there are plenty of people for whom Flock provides no benefit that Firefox doesn’t. If you don’t upload photos or read news feeds or belong to social networks, Flock’s probably not for you unless you just think it looks pretty. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for my dad, but I probably would for my sister and most of my friends. If you do do any of those things, why not give Flock a shot and let me (or our talented support staff) know what you think?

My sleep is seldom affected by being one of a few people at my company who spends part of his time doing system administration, but this week has been a sure exception. We moved our whole public server infrastructure to a new section of our data center (complete with new IP addresses and routing), implemented load balancing of two separate clusters of web front-end machines, migrated two database servers to new hardware, and set up database replication for our web-facing databases. And we did it in sort of a last-minute, pre-product-launch scramble with what shoestring planning we could cobble together, while working on other high-priority projects and with very limited down time and, as far as I can tell, very little in the way of experience among our staff with implementing any of these things in a production environment. I’m not sure it could have gone more smoothly had we planned it for three months. It’s inexplicable, really. Of course, helping to make all this happen necessitated my putting in long hours over the weekend and waking up at times like 1:00 a.m. or 4:30 a.m. before or after an otherwise full workday to minimize the impact of down time. We coordinated this with sysadmins in Germany, California, and Tennessee and a data center in Texas. With my dad coming into town this weekend and a pumpkin-carving planned for tonight, I aim to take off around lunchtime (having started work at 4:30 this morning after staying up late to watch the Red Sox take the second game of the World Series) unless somebody threatens to fire me for doing so.

My company is looking to fill a few positions and is offering me a bonus for any hires I refer who accept a job and stick around. Because I’m lazy, I’m willing to give $2K – $3K (depending on the position filled) of my potential bonus to any who do the legwork and refer successful hires to me. The rules:

1. Hire date must be before June 26.
2. Bonus only applies after the hire has been working for 3 months and provided I’m still with the company (I don’t anticipate leaving).
3. Hire can’t come from a job networking database, etc.
4. Hire can’t already have applied to Flock recently.

In other words, this has to be somebody my company’s not likely to find through the usual channels and who’s really looking in earnest for a job. Basically, I get a bonus if I refer somebody we hire long-term to the company, and I’m eager to share a significant portion of the wealth with anybody who can help get me that bonus.

So, the positions we’re hiring for:

• Experience / User Interaction Designer
• (Senior) Software Engineer
• Graphics Designer
• Senior Manager, Business and Consumer Analytics
• Senior Manager, Product Marketing
• Configuration Developer
• QA Engineer

We have hired people recently who did not live in California or Canada (our two main offices), so geography may not be a limiting factor, though it’s probably better to attract someone who’d be willing to live in Mountain View or Victoria.

Please have any interested candidates email me directly (daryl at learnhouston.com, with “flock job” somewhere in the subject line so I can keep my junk filters from catching it), and also forward me the names of any who you refer, so that I can make sure you get proper credit. I’ll confirm receipt, so if you don’t hear from me, you got caught in my filters. I can provide more info about job descriptions upon request but am for the moment sparing myself the extra work.

I encourage you to make a little pyramid scheme of this, doling out part of your potential bonus to others in your network who may have contacts in need of a job.

It’s confirmed — Knoxville’s second Flock meetup will take place at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday (tomorrow) at the Barne’s and Noble on Kingston Pike (yes, we do know about books here in the south). We’ll gather in the cafe area. We’re a small group so far (but bigger than last time), and anybody in the area is welcome to stop by. I’ve got some nifty buttons to give out and, FedEx willing, I’ll have one or two tee-shirts that people can fight over. Other than that, we’ll just talk Flock. I hope to have a chance to give an overview of things to come and to answer any questions I’m able to about where we are with the software. Admittedly, since I’m on the web end of things now rather than the client side, my knowledge on that front is more limited than in the past. In any case, it should be a good event. Naturally, unless it’s a real snoozer, I’ll report on how it went. Consider this an invitation to other community members to hold meetups and to do status reports afterward. You’ll have to check this with Community Ambassador Will Pate, but I gather we’re getting much closer now to being ready for spread-like campaigns, and meetups seem to me like as good a way as any to participate.

Back in March, I more or less presided over a small Flock meetup in Knoxville. We’ve come a long way since March, and given the recent releases, I thought it might be a good time to hold another meetup event, this time with hopefully a slightly broader reach. Including myself, I can count on four participants this time and may be able to garner a fifth. If I break six, I’ll be pretty happy; Knoxville isn’t exactly browseropolis, you know. If you happen to be in the Knoxville area and are interested in meeting some other Flock users or just want to find out more, please let me know by email (daryl at flock dot com), and I’ll fill you in on the details as I firm up plans. Tentatively, I’m looking at finding a book store or coffee shop with wifi on Wednesday or Thursday evening next week.

There’s no set agenda, but I imagine we’ll talk some about where the browser’s been, where it’s come, and where it’s going. I fully anticipate the airing of some beefs with the browser, and I hope we’ve also given reason for some kudos to be awarded as well.

So, people who know me know I work for Flock, which has something to do with computers. We actually produce a web browser built on the platform that Firefox is built on. When we first started talking big a little less than a year ago, we sang out about how we were going to revolutionize browsing. Talking big got us in a little trouble because we were over-hyped too early. We’ve since changed our message a bit. Rather than being the saviors of the internets, we’re just trying to make the web a little easier to use for some people. If you like to blog, share your bookmarks, and use photo services like flickr and photobucket, maybe Flock is something you’d be interested in. Otherwise, it’s probably not. Here’s some of what I personally like about our product; these things are what would make me think about using Flock if I didn’t feel bound to because I’m an employee.

Built-in news/feeds integration. Most blogs and many news sites you see nowadays display little orange radio-wave icons and advertise things like “RSS2.0″ and “Atom.” These are just techie ways of saying “here’s a list of recent articles that your software may be able to keep track of.” The idea is that you can plug these feeds into your feed reading software, which will notify you of updates so that you don’t have to go out each day and click through to the dozen sites you like to keep up with. There have long been Firefox extensions and standalone applications that would consume these feeds, but I’ve never liked any of them. In the case of the extensions, the interface has always bugged me. In the case of applications, well, I really don’t need another application open on my desktop. Flock has feed-reading built in. I subscribe to the feeds for the blogs I like to read. When one of them has new content, a button in my browser lights up to let me know. So no more going out and visiting the site to see what’s new. When I click the news button, a sidebar opens up that gives me a tree view of my feeds (sort of like an email view, with folders and items on the side), which I can scan easily for updated content. This feature really makes my life easier and is probably my favorite thing in the browser.

Next, there’s the star button. It’s a little button connected to the urlbar. If you’re at a site that you like and would like to save for later, just click the star button. It’ll turn orange, and when you later visit sites you’ve starred, it’ll turn orange to let you know you’ve already starred them. If you’re adventurous, you can make an advanced options box appear that’ll let you apply tags (just think of them as ad hoc labels that are easier to use than nested folders) to the things you star. We call the things you star “favorites.” And there’s a favorites manager that lets you see a list view of the things you’ve starred. You can search through them by tag, sort by recent, organize them into collections (which you can make appear in your toolbar), and go back to their advanced options to change settings. What’s more, if you’re so inclined, you can set your favorites to be synced up with an online bookmarks service like delicious or Shadows so that your favorites are available to you anywhere, any time. I like our favorites system because it lets me do some level of organization of my links without making me manipulate a bunch of nested folders; I can quickly apply multiple labels that let me get to my links later in several ways without having to file them redundantly in multiple folders.

Favorites interact with the search box, which widget can be very useful but is something I often overlook. If you’ve used Firefox before, you’re already familiar with the search box embedded in the browser interface. You can select from among several search engines to direct your searches to, and you can easily perform searches without first having to navigate to the search page itself. I have muscle memory that makes me hit my home button and search straight from Google, so the search box hasn’t historically been something I’ve used (hence my often overlooking it now). But there’s one thing that makes it very handy in Flock: As you type search strings, it searches through your browser history and your favorites and populates a flyout with relevant searches. In other words, it’s a quick interface to search for relevance among things you’ve already flagged as relevant by visiting or starring. And when I say it searches through your browser history, I don’t mean it looks for strings in the url. It does a full text search on pages you’ve visited. So even if you didn’t star that page about platypuses that you found so interesting, if you want to get back to it without combing through thousands of results from Google, you can just start typing “platypus” in the search box, and sites you’ve visited that contained the word will magically appear in the flyout.

Next, there’s photo integration. We have this thing called a topbar that’s a little slice of screen that pops open between the browser buttons and the content window. It’s a pretty good size for displaying thumbnails of photos, and it’s got a neat little slidey interaction that makes it easy to zoom through photos it contains. The photos currently can be set up to pull from accounts at flickr and photobucket, and you can use the topbar to view your own photos or those of other users. The topbar will also notify you by lighting up a browser button when your contacts post new photos, so there’s no more running out to click through your contacts’ pages to see what’s new — Flock just brings it all to you with no effort on your part. This functionality is of pretty limited use to me because I don’t follow photos very closely, and the ones I tend to care about usually get posted to kodakgallery, which Flock doesn’t yet support and which sends me email invitations to see photos anyway. What is useful to me to the extent that I use it is the fact that Flock comes with a photo uploader that makes it pretty easy for me to send photos to flickr. As a Linux user, I’ve always had to do it the painful way, using file upload widgets and navigating through files by name to upload. This is definitely not a good way to batch upload photos. Now I can just open the uploader, browse files or drag files to the window, rotate and crop, and upload. If I were inclined to use photo services very frequently, this would be a great tool for me, especially since most of the tools out there that simplify photo uploading don’t work in Linux. Rumor has it that you can also now drag photos into textareas in the browser and they’ll get uploaded and posted automatically, but I haven’t tested that functionality out yet and so can’t verify that it works.

The last two features that stand out to me are things that used to excite me but that now completely underwhelm me. The first is the blog editor. It’s built right into Flock and lets you edit and save posts locally before pushing to your blog service. One nice thing is that it’s got drag and drop goodness, and I’ll bet that by this time, if you drag photos into it, they get pushed to your photo hosting service. Generally, I’m about as happy editing blog posts in my blog’s user interface, and as far as blog editing usability goes, I prefer the extension produced by Performancing to our blog editor. This is really sort of a shame, as blog integration was one of the things we wanted to address best and first, and in my opinion, we’ve regressed a bit on that front. The other feature I used to like that I now find almost useless is what we’re calling web snippets. This used to be a little sidebar or floaty window that you could drag photos and text snippets to for later use in blog posts. We later added the ability to add notes to the web snippets, and I found this useful as sort of a blogging to-do list. But we crammed the tool down into a little area at the bottom of the screen and made it pretty much unusable because of the way it uses its real estate. In theory, it helps you assemble things to put into blog posts, but in reality, for me, at least, it sits down in the status bar unused. These two features were very appealing to me when we started working on them around a year ago, but they’re now the least useful things we’ve added to the browser.

Which is ok, because, as I think I’ve indicated, we’ve added other useful things. The news functionality alone makes me want to use Flock. I think we’ve also produced a beautiful browser. As much credit as Firefox is due for helping to bring choice back to the web browser industry, the browser’s default theme is heinous. Any time I run Firefox now to test something, I’m shocked at how clunky the buttons and toolbars look, and I find it a little oppressive. Using Flock just feels smoother to me because our interface looks smoother. This is of course purely a matter of taste, and it should be noted that both Flock and Firefox can be re-skinned to look entirely different and better (or worse). I think that for the time being, Flock provides a better experience out of the box, though.
So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 18 months. I do primarily web programming and system administration these days, though I’ve been involved at some point in pretty much every part of the business. Last week, we released our first public beta (we’ve been in developer alpha for months), and feedback so far is pretty good. We’re still recommending that people try Flock out but not be disappointed if we’re not quite ready for prime time or if the browser’s a little buggy. If any of the features I’ve described sound useful to you, I invite you to try the browser out. You can download it here. If you’re not game, no hard feelings; as I said at the beginning of this post, Flock isn’t for everybody.

This is hopefully a precursor to something I’ll eventually blog at my work blog. I wanted to solicit feedback from a not-as-technical crowd as the crowd that tends to read that blog, though to be honest, of the five of you who read me on a semi-regular basis, a solid two are at least as technically-inclined as I am, so this isn’t the best sampling either. Anyway, I’d love to have some responses to a couple of questions I’m about to pose. Email me or add a comment to this post. Respond without Googling around to try to find an answer. If you’re a geek, please don’t add any spoilers to the comments for those to whom this stuff may not be second nature. So, the questions:

What do you think “news,” “feeds,” or “RSS” are in the context of web content? If you have at least a vague idea of what these are, do you find the idea useful?

Thanks for any feedback.

Note: I’m cross-posting this from my Flock blog. We sometimes call our staff and users flockers. I post here for the obvious relevance to Lennie, and I offer this explanatory note because I refer to her in more distanced than usual terms like “my daughter.” Without further ado…

Huh? My daughter woke up at 4:30 this morning, and I was treated to very early morning TV. We often tune in to a station called Noggin that’s got some really great shows (take that, Barney). I like PBS and all, but it doesn’t hold half a candle to Noggin. I usually get my daughter up around 8:00 or 8:30, and we’ll tune in to Max and Ruby or Little Bear (I like Noggin, but both of these shows annoy me) while we eat some breakfast, take our Flintstones vitamins together, etc.  Noggin only runs from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., so we had to entertain ourselves for the first hour-and-a-half this morning (during which time mostly I lay in a daze on the couch while my daughter piled toys on me). When the cartoons started rolling, I was treated to a new (to me) show called Tiny Planets (review). The basic premise is that two fluffy white aliens fly around on their fluffy white couch to various planets in their area. One is the planet of light and color; another is a music planet; another is a nature planet; I think there are six in all. As they catapult around (literally — their couch is slung from their home base by a huge catapult attached to a cord by which they’re ultimately reeled back in) to the various planets, they experience various adventures and misadventures that afford them ample opportunity to try to use critical thinking skills to get out of the jams they find themselves in. It’s a neat little show, a CGI cartoon that’s wacky and strange, but fun.

A couple of times, as they were sling-shotting through space, they passed an asteroid on which three creatures were running around (that is, they were running in place with the asteroid spinning under their feet). The first time the narrator pointed them out, I wasn’t sure what she called them. The next time, I thought it sounded vaguely like “flockers.” And then a third time, in reference to similar creatures on one of the planets, I was pretty sure that’s what they were called. And sure enough, when I looked it up, I learned that these critters are called flockers. They’re described in an epinions review of the show as “a bird-like alien whose intelligence can best be described as ‘dim.’” Luckily, our own flockers far outpace these guys.

So, there’s not much of real relevance to Flock here, but this was a fun little discovery. If you’ve got kids and are fed up with Barney and the other usual suspects, check out the Noggin web site and consider queuing Tiny Planets up in your TiVo if you’re not game for an early morning with your little ones.

I’m moving my Flock entries to another blog for two reasons. One is that most of the people who care enough about me to read this blog don’t really care about all the things I’m going to be writing about Flock in the future. Or to be more precise, they’re interested in Flock in the passing way that one is interested in what an acquaintance or loved-one is doing to earn his living, but they don’t really want — and I can’t blame them — to see three blog posts a day about what’s going on in the Flock community. And as I’ve just switched roles at Flock, leading our community initiative and leaving browser development more or less behind (I hope, as this sort of development was never especially fun for me), there will be a lot more of those posts. The other reason I’m moving those to another blog is that people in the Flock community don’t necessarily want to read about my weight loss (when I last weighed in, I was down 33 pounds from when I started) or my baby. So writing in two places makes pretty good sense. And that’s that.