Purpose of Flock

Why would anyone want to use Flock over just getting Firefox plugins?

Casebash

Posted 2009-10-04T13:15:15.407

Reputation: 5 677

1"social networking" sells :) – None – 2009-10-04T13:23:27.017

People will flock to flock when it goes mainstream! – Phoshi – 2009-10-04T18:44:36.167

Answers

There is ONE, big, main reason I use Flock... and that is RSS feeds.

I tried EVERY RSS sidebar addon for FF as of a year or so ago, and just COULD NOT find any that were really useful and functionally complete. I have a messload of RSS feeds I use for keeping up on all sorts of news, so the RSS functionality of Flock was the seller for me! :)

eidylon

Posted 2009-10-04T13:15:15.407

Reputation: 1 667

Do you really need your feeds real time? Actually, I admit I often use notify.me to get IM notifications of answers for my Stack Overflow questions. – Casebash – 2009-10-04T21:56:24.623

It's not that it shows them in real-time, some of the FF sidebar addins for RSS do that. The thing that Flock's implementation does which none of the FF ones did is that when you have your feeds organized in folders (necessary when you have many), it bolds the folder name and shows an unread count. The best any of the FF addins did was to bold the FEED name and show a count, which meant you need to expand all your folders to see which ones had unread items, which to some extent defeats the purpose of having them in folders in the first place. – eidylon – 2009-10-06T15:45:35.067

(p.s. - "real-time" isn't truly real time in this case, but every 15 minutes or whatever) – eidylon – 2009-10-06T15:47:19.087

I tried it for a while. And couldn't see its appeal over "normal" Firefox. I switch browsers fairly regularly, and keeping yet another one updated was more than I cared to deal with :)

warren

Posted 2009-10-04T13:15:15.407

Reputation: 8 599

They don't, which is why Flock has remained obscure.

slikts

Posted 2009-10-04T13:15:15.407

Reputation: 63

3I'm thinking that some of its obscurity is due to the fact that its home page doesn't even begin to describe what it does. – wfaulk – 2009-10-04T18:43:45.747