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.

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.