This week: International Web 2.0, Mainstream Media Meltdown, Microsoft “Leaked”
docs, Web 2.0 poster children rebel, Post of the Week – samy conquers myspace.

Flock has been getting a lot of flack from certain quarters. Mostly they’re being (unfairly) tagged as a kind of symbol of the so-called Web 2.0 bubble. I’ve been dismayed by some of the venom that’s been directed at Flock…

I don’t think that there truly is a discrepancy in the folklore that “open source is free (as in beer)” and that “startups are venture capital”. One thing I’ve learned about this process is that venture capitalists (read: good venture capitalists) need not only act as a bank account for startups. Indeed, their true value lies in facilitating the maturation of ideas into businesses, and in that interest, they provide their expertise, their rolodex and their insights in order to bring about the construction of profitable organizations.

That we’re open source and also trying to sustain ourselves is not something altogether new. How we intend to make a living is somewhat new, but as Bart has pointed out, there are established examples that prove that this is a reasonable approach.

Put it this way: consumer software development (an awful phrase, I admit) using open source methodologies and licensing means that the areas in which we differentiate ourselves are: speed, service, feature set, vision and execution. In the olden days (ha!) when you could keep your code to yourself, you just had to force people into proprietary data formats, add a few features every coupla years and provide tech support. If you were first to a space or dominated by having the most ubiquitous data format or owned the desktop, you could get lazy while your monopoly built itself.

The web is opening doors and revealing possibilities that the old guard probably hoped would never gain popular traction. So Flock intends to be an example of one of those fast companies that’s out to make a difference not just in releasing awesome open source software, but in how we go about building it, incorporating a community made up of more than just developer geeks.

To sum up Flock’s vision, straight from our homepage: We believe that it should be easy for everyone to contribute to and participate on the web. While we’ve talk a lot about building a “social browser”, it seems more like that if you do begin participating an engaging on the web, that the social interactions, like this one on this blog (which was created in Flock), will become more common and accessible.

Which has an inherit discrepancy in it. “Open source is free”. “Startups are venture capital.” I am not saying that it is that way it is, I am just saying that that might be a very common perception.
I think you have a serious problem there, which also might explain the huge criticism that exists in some places. E.g. Flock sucks and Houston we have a solution….

And for the vision: a true great vision can be summed up in one single sentence. I am very curious hearing that one.

To your point, I think it’s going to be an ongoing process, but yes, I fully intend to do more to communicate where we’re going and what’s up next. I’m drafting a few things for the site currently that should help with this.

As an aside, truth be told, due to a bug in an hourly build of Flock, I ended up publishing this post before I’d read through it one last time. Oh well — guess that’s the breaks when eating your own dogfood!

Even this post doesn’t do much in that respect.