Enough already about Flock. Flock is the top item on Memeorandum with everyone talking about it. I downloaded it last night after I got an email from Josh suggesting I check it out. After using it for a bit last night, I have to say great idea but, um, why can’t this be an extension?

I don’t want to spend too much time on this right now (I’m basically waiting for something to finish on my computer at work), so I’ll point to Om Malik’s review and Frederico Oliveira’s post which pretty much captures my thoughts on this:

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like the idea and the team, they’re great guys and really talented developers. But being 100% honest, I’m still not sure I’m changing my browser to have a way to integrate delicious and a blogging tool into my browsing experience. I know some people will, but I’m not sure about numbers.

As they both say, don’t get me wrong… this is a cool development and some of the UI concepts and integration, e.g. the Flickr to blog integration, are really nice and, in some cases, extraordinarily brilliant. But, I don’t see why this can’t be a standalone application, even using the Mozilla engine that integrates via XPCOM IPC to integrate with Firefox. That would allow me to use Firefox and the rich set of (tested/common) extensions with Flock’s otherwise awesome tools. The Shelf (#13 on the list) is very, very cool. I’ve been looking for something like that for a few years and have just been too lazy/busy to write it.

The biggest source of confusion, I think, is the disconnect between their goal of “innovating the web browser user experience” and the fact that, well, Flock looks like Firefox with a fancy theme and some extra doodads. It’s not really innovating the experience that much yet, and so the hype is out of sync with the current state of development.

I look forward to hearing more from them and seeing what version 1.0 looks like (this is version 0.4.8). If you’re curious about their overall plan, the founder of Flock has a rundown of the overall plan and an explanation of why they chose to build a browser.

Good luck to them.