Performancing plugin

Nice.

What else can I say? The Performancing blog editor plugin (availble in the Firefox extensions pages) is really nice.

So far, the editor appears more well integrated into the browser experience than Flock’s. Flock will hate to hear this, but there’s now no reason for me to use Flock… ouch.

If integrated blogging was their core differentator (I hope not, but haven’t seen anything yet to suggest otherwise), then the Flock guys must be a bit unnerved. I know they’ve already responded, at least generally, to some of the criticism of late, but the article Flock’s Chris Messina wrote rambled a bit… not sure exactly what he was trying to say. The duct tape analogy made me wonder a bit about his sense of importance. Isn’t Flock of fork of Firefox?? Couldn’t the duct tape analogy apply also to Flock?

I’m looking for tools that solve problems. If Flock can integrate into the toolbar all the same functionality of all the available extensions (well, OK, a superset of the really good ones), and allow me to use these extensions when I need them and then make them get out of the way, then they can afford to attack the extension approach as “Firefox and duct tape”. But I think its a bit premature to take that position. If this is the beginning of another browser war (My Firefox fork can beat up your Firefox fork!), count me out.

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Posted December 27th, 2005 in Blogging.
  • Cool, no worries! And this theme is much better than the previous one! ;)
  • I appreciate the clarification about Flock's ultimate goal (normalization of two-way communication), Chris. Now that makes sense & does create differentiation.

    As for extensions, I agree that there are some real dogs out there, and self-regulated QA doesn't generally produce high levels of either quality or assurance... but many of the extensions are simply great.

    As for my fork supposition, I see (again) that Flock is simply based upon the Mozilla codebase, but it isn't actually a fork. Somehow my mind read that as 'fork'. I stand corrected.
  • Hey John, Flock really isn't a fork of Firefox. Yes, we're going off in a different direction but we're not forking the platform to do so. In fact, development is much slower because we're working around Firefox as our core platform. Ideally our work will be able to be pulled back to Firefox, either as extensions and or platform improvements -- after all, that's the beauty of open source.

    Now, in terms of my duct tape comment, I was referring generally to extensions -- since oftentimes the quality varies to a great degree from one extension to another. Personally, I'm a big fan of extensions and use quite a few myself. But I know that, for example, if I wanted to get my mom (or even my college-aged brother) blogging, he'd be hard pressed to get going. There are so many things that we who are already blogging have figured out on our own that aren't simple, aren't intuitive and aren't easy about publishing online. I mean, I used to work on a platform that was dedicated to web publishing. It wasn't easy -- and oftentimes the meager results of using a web-page based editor left authors disappointed and frustrated.

    With Flock the goal is make it possible to better use your browser for two-way communication, whether via blogs, podcasts, video and so on. We're still figuring out the infrastructure to support all of these new mecasting technologies, and so we see that these platforms would all benefit from having a client that can actually interface with their APIs in one unified interface. Let's face it, learning a new UI paradigm every time there's a new web service is counterproductive. Long term, Flock aims to ameliorate that problem.

    Anyway, it's quite clear that we need to better communicate what we're doing, how we're going to do it and get releases out in a timely manner. We're learning an awful lot in the process. Seeing projects like Performancing come out is actually very encouraging -- because it's clear that having publishing tools in the browser does make sense for a lot of people. We just need to perfect the user experience and suddenly (or at least the hope goes) Flock will begin to make a lot more sense.
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