Will Tschumy quickly and quietly left Flock. Last Friday was his last day.

Will joined Flock in April, and Chris Messina welcomed him to Flock with a post Who is Will Tschumy? Plus: Cardinal Pre-review.
I did not work much directly with Will, but thin…

I’m glad we could come to some understanding! As usual, our opinions are not terribly opposing when it comes down to what we’d like to see offered… in fact, you nailed one of the reasons I’m so gung-ho about tags: universal tags across the browser — for blog posts, favorites, feeds, photos and anything else! Right now you have this weird category system that only applies to blogs… how does that help me organize my online life — it’s totally disjoint!?

And yeah, you’re right — neither of us are “usual” users today… but tomorrow kids are going to be a lot more like me, except worse.

They will have 10,000 Flickr, delicious, upcoming, myspace, facebook and on and on buddies. Just wait and see. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

And Flock is being created based on *today’s* behavior, hell man, might as well go back to building one-off extensions!

The notifications thing is probably a matter of differences in workflows. We’ll never make everybody happy (which doesn’t mean we should give up on trying). I find that the current functionality greatly streamlines my browsing, though I admit that I’m not your typical user (nor are you). That said, I readily acknowledge that there must be cool ways of further enhancing the experience. It’d be neat if the browser remembered what content I most frequently read or spent the most time reading and floated that to the top, or gave me the occasional teaser to my neglected content, for example. You no doubt have a million much more dazzling ideas than that in mind (and three-year-old flickr mockups to back them up).

A single source notification or an unread count does not do justice to the complexity of the information that we need to be able to take in and consume!

As for the tags thing, I’ll boil it down: if you’re going to allow me to either a) categorize or b) tag my content I need to do so at the point of creation (as I can do with photos in Flock). That blogging works differently makes absolutely no sense.

If it’s a technical problem, fix it. There aren’t that many blogging APIs and if WordPress leads, others will follow. It’s far to valuable (and simple!) a feature not to get added to the APIs.

It’s not about shiny tag pillboxes — in fact those never worked consistently! — it’s about being able to apply some kind of metadata from within Flock without having to venture into the backend guts of your blogging software. Even if the technical implementation of tags sucked, it was a solution to this problem, and as far as I’m concerned, not being able to create categories within Flock is comparitively a major regression, technical implementation be damned! The lowest common denominator is simply too low for Flock’s lofty ambitions!

On the tags thing, I don’t think the in-line tag solution was good at all (I presume that’s the implementation you’re referring to). It was a nasty hack, I thought. First, some people didn’t want to link to Technorati (so at a minimu, that should have been configurable). Second, while it sort of tags posts, it doesn’t accommodate grouping by tags in any standardized way because it would require a full-text search to do so, and that’s a very ugly prospect (no tag clouds, no tag counts, no searching by tags, etc.). Our ui was fine, but the technical implementation was very very crappy. I agree that it’d be nice if the tag/category ui weren’t hidden. I presume that’s in part so that we can fetch categories each time a blog post is added to make sure we’ve got any new ones. It’d be nice if we could add tags/categories ad hoc as is now possible in wordpress, but I don’t know that other blogging systems allow that, so we’re probably shackled. I suspect your zeal for the old tagging mechanism is for the eye-candy of the tag pillbox thing. If we could bring that back to the front of the workflow and make it add categories ad hoc to whatever blogging platform a given person uses, I think we’d be in great shape. I just don’t think the server-side technology is there in the APIs for all the platforms we need to support, so we’re forced to fall back to the lowest common denominator.

I meant to blog this earlier… I was reading Chris Messina’s blog and he had an entry about the latest Flock build and in his entry he had one of the best descriptions of what I am trying to achieve…….

And per my point responding to your point about blog-to-blog integration… again, I’ll have to disagree with your characterization of my characterization. WordPress is taking advantage of the same internal functionality that all the other blog software use to create categories (despite having amended the MetaWebBlog API specifically for Flock to allow for this external functionality).

My point is that we solved the API limitation problem when we implemented tags instead of categories. As we expected, people revolted and we added back categories. Now tags are all but hidden unless you use an “advanced” interface, which, in my estimation makes no sense, since adding a category is certainly an advanced task if you have to go into your blog’s admin UI to create categories to begin with! We had a cross-blog solution to the problem and now it’s submerged beneath layers of UI. In fact the argument I’m making is the opposite of what you say it is: with the current implementation, creating categories works on exactly zero blog platforms without the burden of leaving the Flock editor and visiting your admin options. Hardly a user friendly or efficient option, considering what we’d achieved with tags.

@ Will: appreciate your response — I do look forward to subsequent releases and what Will might add to the team. I do have high expectations — perhaps higher than most — but I’ll be easily pleased if I see some breakthroughs in clarity in upcoming releases. I don’t doubt that you guys won’t give it your all — and I’m eager to see what kind of processes you adopt to ensure that by one-point-oh your product meets its potential.

@ Erwan: I’d love to be able to drag an Upcoming URL onto the Web Snippets drawer and then drop it into my Google Calendar and have the event information be prepopulated.

Oh, and of course I want to be able to copy and paste from the desktop into web calendars.

For people, I want a browser-based social network that I can move from one site to another — using hCard and XFN.

I’d also like to organize my blog posts, history and feeds by person, by tag, by location and by event.

I really want to integrate microformats into the Web Snippets, but first you need to tell me what feature based on microformats you want. Just using microformats because it’s cool doesn’t really makes sense to me, but if there is a pragmatic reason to use them, just tell me what it is.

Maybe with the people concept microformats will really make sense in the Snippets. In the meantime, well…

Chris Messina, formerly of Flock, suggests that Flock doesn’t get the social dimension of social browsers: [from Who is Will Tschumy? Plus: Cardinal Pre-review at FactoryCity] Flock still doesn’t seem to have a clear conception of a “friendâ€? or …