Flock1 continues to go it alone. My greatest concerns for Flock nine months ago are just as relevant today.
Where’s the release?
As dominik.lukes puts it “am I crazy or are you actually touting the fact that 0.8 upgrade you promised for last September is only going to be in beta this summer”.
Flock CEO Shawn Hardin responds well including
“Innovation is hard. It is also incredibly fun and what our team thrives on, but – by definition – it is work that hasn’t been done before and it is challenging to do in a dependable, discoverable and usable way.”
Release early, release often; listen and respond to what your customers and potential customers say. Organic.
Open, Community Involved Development?
It was always a “discussion” within Flock between open source participants and the members of the team whose experience had been proprietary software, conventional software development, and traditional business and marketing. Bart Decrem, Chris Messina, Jesse Andrews, Ian McKellar, Andy Smith (termie) led the open source cause (and I tried to chronicle and share as much as possible)! None of those people are with Flock any longer.
I am encouraged by the continued efforts of Zbigniew Braniecki (gandalf), Erwan Loisant, Daryl L. L. Houston, Robin Slomkowski, Manish Singh (yosh), and Matthew Willis (lilmatt), but Bart in his senior leadership role made it possible, and happen!2
Open source can mean access to the source code, but it can mean a lot more. Open source is fundamentally social.
Social browser?
Two of Flock’s most faithful feel similarly in their posts on Flock and Mozila Coop. Daniel Lackey wrote “See, the key to open source is OPEN.” and Jon Homan wrote “I just feel Flock needs to be open in more ways than just source.”
So what does Shawn’s “execution” mean? I hope it will not continue to be based on his and other senior leaders proprietary background.3
Why go it alone?
What is not in Shawn’s respond, but what is the case: Flock the one time Web 2.0 poster child, has long been developed in a pressure cooker environment in need of an outstanding product release.
Not 2.0, but 1.0 is the big number hanging over Flock’s head, and the fear of getting it wrong and not having an audience to get it right again.
Flock, don’t you think we, your fans and community members, have wanted to and still want to share your burden?
What will a grown up Flock look like? Is there a part for us to play in that growth?
- I have a small financial interest in Flock’s success, and many dear friends work there. [↩]
- Board member David Cowan of Bessemer Investment understands and appreciated open source. [↩]
- Authoritarian styles of leadership? [↩]
What would you suggest Flock do to fix this? Work to release point releases faster (release early, release often)? Support core Flock development from volunteer community developers? Point the community to the development roadmap on a regular basis?
Per your Kryptonite post, dogfooding your product definitely helps, and I’d imagine they’re doing that already. If you’re like me, you can install hourly builds on a regular basis which help track where develop is happening.
A web browser’s audience is quite large; you can’t please everyone; etc. I’m lucky in that I have a defined audience in my development for work. A browser’s audience, on the other hand, is an ever-moving target.
To quote from your Flock Kryptonite post, “Be predictable in the product Flock is going to be in six months and the path being taken to get there.” This suggests transparency in updating the community on project progress, which can be stressful to those involved. What are you doing to remain predictable?
What is Automattic doing that differentiates it from other community-based for-profit companies?
Would you care to explain the Flock browser trends graphic? You’ve got a graphic with no context and you don’t refer to it in your post.
I’ll overlook your misspelling of Mr Hardin’s last name in the third paragraph.
I’ve written a lot… care to address any of this?
I think if you read my post (http://danakin.wordpress.com/2007/04/12/the-coop/) and Jon’s post (http://jonhoman.wordpress.com/2007/04/13/re-the-coop/) that Lloyd refers to, and then re-read this post, you may understand a bit more. Like Lloyd said months back, one thing we at Flock need to do is “Improve customer and community relationships” and this is at ALL levels. Support needs to be faster, conversation in IRC should be livelier, and, above all, developments need to be discussed openly. Sure, you don’t want to try to boil the oceans with hype, but honest, “this is where we are at” communication needs to open up.
We are, to the average Joe, not delivering predictably (leastwise in my opinion). However, that isn’t to say development hasn’t continued in this period; as Shawn has said, we are achieving some crucial milestones and we’re pushing hard for a release in a short while. It’s been quite a while since 0.7 came out, and we are now getting prepped for our next major release (kinda how there was no 0.6, there won’t be an official 0.8 [though you can download 0.8 off tinderbox currently] but rather a jump to 0.9). We are letting folks take a gander at the new version before we open it up to everyone (http://flock.com/node/10665).
Note that I am not saying Flock is floundering from a developmental viewpoint; far from it! The 0.9 improvements are pretty substantial, and there is a ton of great new stuff (brand new UI, MyWorld, vastly improved mediabar [not just for photos anymore!] and MUCH better favorites handling, amongst others). What we need to work on is conveying how much cool stuff is actually going on behind the scenes, and making all that “behind the scenes” stuff come to the front; let folks see what we are doing as we do it.
Just my views on the situation and the post. Others may feel differently, and I would personally like to hear their points.
I like a lot of what you’re saying Lloyd, particularly about what makes open source — and it certainly isn’t just code.
I think that what Flock needs is clear statement of intent and a clear promise for how it will serve its best customers. I feel that the tone of Flock has gradually quieted and that Shawn has brought a new corporate voice that was happily missing before. The organization might be transforming into a productivity powerhouse, but would I want to take “Flock the Social Browser” out for a drink if its personality is one that wears a tie and is more at home in a Windows box? I’m not so sure.
In any case, I’m not sure what’s keeping Flock honest anymore; I see so much innovation from Google, Adobe and even Yahoo and Microsoft (granted, these are huge, highly funded organizations) that I wonder how Flock intends to keep up. Meanwhile Mozilla is toying with social functionality and many features that were originally intended for Flock (microformat detection, offline browsing, history search, etc).
So the big question, which I think you’ve alluded to, is what is Flock ‘s identity going to be from here on out? How can it still differentiate itself when its window for uniqueness is slowing fading and the features it started building two years ago are now nearly taken for granted. I think there is certainly still a place for Flock at the table, but I’m struggling to figure out what role it intends to play, given its awkward and distant relationship to its open source roots. Is it really open source if it doesn’t also act like it? More and more, I think not.
Hi Chris Vance,
Thank you for pointing out the typo and that I did not link as I meant to the Google Trends page. The context of the “trend” graph is Flock being “the one time Web 2.0 poster child”.
You ask a lot of good questions, and I will am happy to try and answer them, but some would seem to distract from the main point of my article, and would be best discussed else where — definitely one of my main goals of critical review of others work is how it relates to my own.
First, what are your own thoughts on the questions? Do you like how Flock is growing? What would you like to see differently?
Daniel, I don’t know who average Joe is, but as Chris Messina so regularly beautifully articulated there is an ecosystem of overlapped communities involved in any project and product, and you have to decide how to serve them.
Otherwise, I completely agree with you!
Flock Inc sharing where on their road they are and what open source means in the context of their product seems like a reasonable step.
Lloyd, the first of the questions you pose, “Where’s the release”, is very legitimate. The upcoming 0.9 release will be the first major release since last summer’s 0.7 release. This does not exactly follow the “Release early, release often” guideline. However, I believe Flock is taken their users’ feedback into consideration when planning new features, etc. Plus, I think more frequent releases are on the horizon. I think development slowed down when management was changed. Without a set of goals/specs, development can’t really go anywhere.
Your second question was “Open, Community Involved Development?”. Yes, I feel Flock could be more transparent and open in regards to a lot of development information. However, from time to time, there is quite a bit of design discussion on the development mailing list. But, a good majority of the participants in that discussion are Flock’s own developers, which negates some of the motivation for discussion on a mailing list instead of direct contact with other devs. Also, Evan has stated he would love to blog more, but does not want to bore us with meeting minutes, etc. I have stated that I would love to see meeting minutes, more photos around HQ, and whatever else the people at Flock will put online. I would read or view anything those people make available.
Your last question, “Why go it alone?”, is an interesting one. In the spring of 2006, there was a fairly large number of volunteer testers. Just looked at your blog archive. The volunteer testing community has definitely decreased in size since then, shown by the few number of bugzilla mails I get from volunteers. I don’t claim to understand the dynamics of communities, but one motivation to keep testing Flock was the acknowledgment that I received from you via your blog. Also, Flock has not highlighted any community members through the Flockstar Spotlight in recent times. Perhaps now would be a good time to start those efforts again.
Despite the negative vibe my comments might have, I think Flock has great potential to succeed. To have users that feel so strongly about the browser that they are very frank about certain weaknesses in the browser is a very good thing.
Hey Lloyd,
As always, I appreciate your investment in Flock and the Flock community. I owe you a beer for all the ideas/emotions/changes you’ve stirred up over the last few months. I would like to address a few things you mentioned:
-Regarding Transparency. Having just come back from the Online Community Unconference, I can tell you that this is a problem across many companies. How does a company be transparent without A) sabotaging themselves and B) boring people to death?
Part A is easier to solve…Flock keeps partner-related developments somewhat private in respect to our partners. Everything else, once it’s more than a random pipe dream, is communicated on the wiki (not perfectly, but we try). I think it’s important to not post the random pipe dreams, because a lot of the negativity that has been directed towards Flock is due to the lack of delivery of ideas that we broadcast early on that were just that…ideas.
Part B (with some crossover to Part A) is a lot harder. Don’t get me wrong: I agree that we’ve been far too silent for the last few months. I shoulder much of the blame for this, and feebly offer my recent movement into this position as an excuse. Some of the things we will be doing shortly are:
-Letting Flockstars test drive Flock 0.9 (though anyone can try out the daily builds if they’d like) and collecting/acting upon technical and non-technical feedback.
-Letting Flockstars preview the new Flock.com and soliciting feedback.
-Writing a series of blog posts comparing Cardinal and Cormorant.
-Publishing and maintaining a ~2 week schedule for Flock to let the community know what we’re up to.
-Maintaining our public wiki more regularly (we have just brought in a new Flocker who is in charge of keeping the wiki clean, usable, and pertinent).
These are great steps, but definitely not enough. However, I am going to put you and the rest of the community on the spot here: what do you want to know? Somehow I don’t think that most Flockstars want to know that today we designed a new play button to videos in the Media Minibar, reviewed some videos that will be on the new flock.com, had some birthday cake, talked about how we might fix a Mediamagic bug, and went home. If the community DOES want to know all of this, please tell us (I will continue to ask this question in a larger forum).
-Regarding Releases. I think it is imperative that we keep in mind that Flock of 6 months ago is not the same as Flock today. After getting acclimated at Flock, Shawn set very specific milestones for the product (I am aware that people would like to know what these are, and that will be part of our transparency policy as much as possible). Give or take a week or two, we’ve hit all of these. YES, Flock 0.8/0.9/1.0 were supposed to be out a long time ago. Nobody here is unaware of that: we’re all painfully aware. We hit growing pains, we floundered, but now we’re back on track. Shawn’s intention is to get us into a regular release cycle. There’s nothing we can do about the past. We can only change the future.
-Regarding Community-involved development. This is extremely important to everyone on the team, especially Shawn and I. However, I think there’s a distinction to be made between users, community, and Flockstars.
The Flockstars, our most visible and active community members, provide a lot of really helpful feedback, and I log every vote for features and services. These are all collected and used as one of the top factors in deciding which features and services to add to Flock. I mention this on the Suggestions forum or directly to users when I do this, but I realize this could be broadcast better.
Community is a larger group of Flock users who are perhaps not as much of the “culture”, even if they’re involved. These users are just as important as Flockstars.
Users are all the people using Flock (including the community and Flockstars). I would venture to bet that many people who use Flock never go to flock.com, email the flockstars mailing list, or come to meetups. These people are just as important as community and Flockstars. However, our work with them is less visible than our conversations on the blog, the forums, and the mailing lists.
I intend to write this all into a flock.com blog post soon, but we have several forms of feedback from Flock users.
-Every time we release an upgrade to 0.7, we poll a percentage of updaters. Past polls have included “what do and don’t you like about Flock?”, “What do you do online?” and “What social networking activities do you do online and which would you like to see in Flock?”.
-In contrast to these active Flock users, we also poll everyone uninstalling Flock and ask them why they are uninstalling. While we get a whole lot of bad words (I would know, I read every response), we also get a lot of feedback on why people are no longer using Flock. Bugs, usability problems, and more are found through these.
-I surf the blogosphere weekly and collect all negative and positive feedback regarding Flock. I respond to the majority of these posts and send a condensed collection of these posts to the staff. I hope to include some of this in a Flockstars newsletter that I’ve been cooking up.
-In addition to these activities, we have community test days (during which we document both technical and non-technical feedback), engage in conversations with the Flockstars on IRC, and respond to nearly all (I’d love to get rid of that nearly) posts on the blog and forums.
I’m not trying to toot my own (or Flock’s own) horn here, but I want to be clear about what Flock is doing. The fact that I had to write this response clearly shows that I am/we are not communicating these actions well enough to our community, and that is something that I am actively trying to change. All suggestions are welcome (I appreciate what you’ve suggested in the past).
With this new information, what would you (and the rest of the community) like to see more of? Like I mentioned before, I am not going to blog about every birthday party and bore everyone to death unless I am told that YES, Flockstars want to know about every birthday party. If they do, I will put all my energy into delivering that..I am their ambassador. Hell, if they want to, they can come. I will order an extra cake.
Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com
PS: I am aware that I did not discuss the issue of Open Source. As you’ve seen, lilmatt is very intent on pushing fixes upstream to Mozilla, and I am encouraged by the discussion that has grown around this. While I am involved in this work, I don’t feel qualified enough to wade into the issue.
Wow, that’s a whole blog post, ain’t it?
-E
@Evan: I might suggest that, yes, we’d rather hear about your minute decisions than not. I for one would be interested in hearing a heartbeat from Flock; it’s not about reading every single one of your updates or blog posts, but when I come in earshot of you guys (through blogs or TechMeme or whatever) I know that there’s still oxygen flowing to the brain; silence on the web is death — for all the promise of being a social browser, my perception is that you’ve been on life support for too long. If there really are things going inside that collective brain of yours, you’ve gotta get this stuff out there in one form or another — and no, I don’t want just another update from Shawn on the blog.
I’m more interested in the process and the challenges and HOW you solve problems than the product itself. Seeing your process unfolds helps me decide whether I can trust you or not — that’s the point of transparency. If I can’t see into your decision making, how can I trust you? And, when others are *far* more open, why would I bother waiting to hear from you? You require far too much effort to just get a basic sense for where things are at.
Your open community is your most valuable partner; that we have no insight into what’s going on and what changes are being made makes us feel jaded. You might think that you’re respecting your commercial partners by not being open about what’s going on but you’re shunning your most valuable asset. How long do you think we’ll really stick around if you constantly put your commercial partners’ interests first?
I’m hesitantly optimistic about the current Flock Beta process. I’d like to see some deadlines and a bi-weekly release schedule. I’d like to see you turning mailing list feedback into bugs with Bugzilla IDs. I’d like to see you collate and blog about all the mockups and screenshots I and others will be providing you. Most importantly, I want to see the browser really improve over this beta process — and that means ripping shit out if it’s not working.
So, ball’s in your court. I await to be impressed.
Pingback: VentureBeat » Flock still trying to take flight
If they can’t get it to work, no one will use it. I understand where they are going with it, but there is no compelling reason to use it til they get it functioning as well as Firefox in windows or Camino in OS X. Flock is unusable on a mac, not sure about on a pc.
mlankton, what do you mean by unusable? I know that they are putting a lot of effort into improving the performance on all platforms.
As you say, no reason is compelling without it working.