flock.com - The Social Web Browser

[sebnem]

Hi,

With Flock you have a smooth way of browsing all your social
networks. I believe with a DP plugin, Flock would be the glue, and a
fast lane.

Here's the most important point for me: via the plugin my original
social graph would always be on my hard drive, via the plugin I can
synchronize my graph with the various networks I'm in; basically on
sites like facebook, myspace,... only a copy and a subset of my graph
is visible. Locally I have my entire connections annotated in an XFN
way etc. The plugin will help visualize and organize my graph locally
and help any updates get into DPenabled social networks in ways I
desire.

I wrote to the Flock people, b/c I did not find anyone of them
here...Has anyone here have conntections to them?

An ff plugin could work the same way - however flock is already
social, and I assume the way to go is then shorter.

[Antonio Tapiador del Dujo]

El Wednesday 06 February 2008 12:52:53 sebnem escribió:
> Hi,
>
> With Flock you have a smooth way of browsing all your social
> networks. I believe with a DP plugin, Flock would be the glue, and a
> fast lane.

I use Flock as my preferred browser and agree.. It would be really cool to
connect all the server development and standards with Flock.
It currently only supports people and services for a few social networks.

> Here's the most important point for me: via the plugin my original
> social graph would always be on my hard drive, via the plugin I can
> synchronize my graph with the various networks I'm in; basically on
> sites like facebook, myspace,... only a copy and a subset of my graph
> is visible. Locally I have my entire connections annotated in an XFN
> way etc. The plugin will help visualize and organize my graph locally
> and help any updates get into DPenabled social networks in ways I
> desire.
>
> I wrote to the Flock people, b/c I did not find anyone of them
> here...Has anyone here have conntections to them?

Did you talk to Evan, the "Community Ambassador"?
ev...@flock.com

[Mike Reynolds]

I agree that browser plug-ins will play a role. In fact, that's what
the Mozilla CEO says here:
http://readwritetalk.com/2008/01/14/john-lilly-ceo-mozilla/

"I suspect that we'll start to participate DataPortability.org"

But it just won't be one browser. Mozilla/Firefox/Flock. Safari. I
hear Microsoft has a browser called IE. Perhaps the plug-ins will
leverage Web Standards. They'll have to.

Further, what me may see more of is offline tools via browsers and
perhaps more browsing via other desktop applications.

Mike

[Mike Reynolds]

Follow-up comment: Ideally, we'd have DP code that works behind the
scenes to achieve portability. It would be easier to say, be in
LinkedIn and just click a button saying import my Facebook contacts or
"hey, mine my del.icio.us interests or generic APML file to find
people I may want to contact in LinkedIn to expand my network."

I think that should be the goal. The less stuff that has to live on
the browser, the better. I like being able to log onto any computer -
and seeing my online world. Device portability.

DP standards (like "Web Standards") could be useful to enable web
services to talk to each other. Perhaps we could squeeze some DP-
related code into HTML5/etc. But then again EcmaScript has been
standardized.

Just some thoughts.

[Dan Brickley]

I posted some notes last September that did a bit of a
compare-contrast between the Flock representation of online accounts,
and that in FOAF. Also compared re Brad's design.

http://danbri.org/words/2007/09/23/209

There are some responses from Flock guys (past and present) in the comments too.

I think the unifying point of concern right now is to take these
various representations of accounts, and generate canonicalised,
flattened identifiers of some kind. The sgn:// URIs in Google's new
service being one take on that design. I'd probably use a tag: URI
instead, but the general approach definitely is useful.

cheers

Dan