Flocking hype, Ajax! Mail! Client! (and a monumental waste of carbon)
In today's IT Blogwatch, we look at the hype around Flock, and a new Yahoo! Mail client. Not to mention possibly the most bizarre code fragments ever...
Yet another new browser? Well, not quite. Perhaps best described as a new distribution of Firefox, complete with a new UI theme and a coherent and stable set of extensions (much as a Linux distribution contains all the other stuff that goes around the Kernel). As reported by Jeff MacIntyre, Flock [is] a "social browser," ... [it] plays nicely with popular web services like Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us [and has] WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop blogging tools ... It's a clear attempt to be the browser of choice for the Web 2.0 user. Whatever. Jeff's piece notes a lot of "buzz," but then links to a blog run by a mate of some Flock team members and a few bemused comments on MSDN's Channel 9. What's a blogwatcher to think? Michael Arrington has reviewed it; after dryly describing the bookmarking features, he expostulates all over the blogging tool: This is pure magic ... it rocks ... Wow. I mean, really, wow. This stuff is not trivial to build. The Ajax functionality is stunning. But Marek Futrega pours cold water and opines: doesn't have a chance to fly ... tries to be everything while practice shows that simple things win. You either do a social browser, a blogging tool or a social bookmarking service. Never everything in one. A very good example of this less-is-more approach is Google. They could build [a] killer-app with photo/browser/search/IM/blogging/kitchensink/younameit but for some reason they offer simple apps like Talk or Picasa. Jens-Petter Berget guesses that this will be the first real blogbrowser, and reminds us that at the moment you need an invite code to download the browser.
Yet another new Ajax email client? Yahoo! is readying their response to the very responsive, interactive feel of Gmail. (Ajax? Explanation here.) Dave Winer: it's very nice. Soon it will be offered to all Yahoo users ... The scroll bars work, which is a big improvement over other browser-based email apps that divide your mailboxes into pages. In Yahoo, you don't have to wait while it loads the next page. It seems to be loading the next page in the background, while you're scrolling through the previous page. In related news, David Ferris (he of the eponymous company) calls Scalix's Ajax client The best web client for the last couple of years has been, and [it] continues to be ... very impressive product ... hard to tell you're using a browser ... Rich clients have a very high administration overhead. So clearly, if a browser can delivery a high quality experience, it's far better to use than a rich client.
Buffer overflow:
- PC World's McCracken takes a detailed look at Office 12
- Bubble or return to pre-bubble? Sequoia raises more money
- Oops: Packet8 spills nearly 21,000 customer emails
- Lee cleared to work for Google, with conditions
- Dave Jones: Fedora kernel updates
- Wade Mealing: Sun, once again copy-catting Red Hat
- An interview with Bill Gates from PDC 2005
- Rushed mobile WiMax standard getting closer... hype machine waits
- Is China banning Alexa?
- First keyloggers, now keylisteners?
- Graphically richer apps
- New sample MySQL database
- Manfacturing is a fraction of the cost
- Call Monty Python! The holy grail of cheat sheets has been found!
- "Can do" versus "not my job" attitude when dealing with clients
- Use "regular expressions" for Word find and replace operations
- Vigilante: Distributed doer of justice?
- It's too loud when...
And finally... "masterpiece of programming humor" or "monumental waste of carbon"? You decide.
Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk.
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