The other day my friend Alex sent me a link to a web browser called Flock. “It’s a social web browser,” she said, immediately sending my imagination off in various directions. What a great place to move social networking! Out of the viewport and directly into the browser itself. The possibilities seemed limitless for such a tool.

Unfortunately, Flock is not a “social web browser” as I’d hoped (and as their own web site claims). It is a “social network browser.” The basic idea is thus: you install Flock and tell it all of your login information for pretty much any and every social network you are a part of. It goes out and aggregates information from those networks into a “media bar,” allowing you to view updates to your networks without actually having to go to them. On top of that, you are able to easily upload photos to Flickr, updates to Twitter, etc., again without ever having to visit the sites themselves. When I write it all out, I realize how great it must sound to some people.

I don’t get it.

Maybe I’m in the minority, but I LIKE going to Facebook and Flickr and Twitter. That’s what makes social networks exciting to me: opening Firefox and spending twenty to thirty minutes updating my own information as well as browsing the various networks I’m on for my friends’ updates. It’s always a pleasant surprise to find a freshly commented-on Flickr photo, or to see that my friends changed their profile pictures on Facebook. The pleasure is gained from browsing, which I feel like Flock is trying to take away. To me, Flock is the Cliff Notes of the social network. Sure, you get the general idea of what’s happening across your network. But the full experience comes from browsing yourself.

All of this, of course, made me consider what I thought a real social web browser would be.

First of all, the browser itself should be its own social network. You should download, install, and be asked to register as a user of the network. Once registered, you can add your friends (who themselves are registered with the browser, of course) using the browser’s built-in Friend Search, or something of that manner. Profiles and search results would appear either as a web site in the viewport or as a collapsible sidebar in the browser.

Once you’ve built up your network, it’s time to browse the Internet! The whole point of a social web browser, I think, is to share your Internet experience with those around you. With that in mind, there would be a button at the end of your address bar that would automatically send that address to your entire friends’ list. Each user would have Bookmarks and Friendmarks. Each day you could pull up your Friendmarks and see what each friend has Friendmarked as a cool web site, article, photo, etc. Then you could choose to Friendmark it as well to your own network of friends, who could send it to their friends, etc.

All of that to say that there is a huge difference between a “social web browser” and a “social network browser.” I’m looking for a browsing experience which will allow users to share their Internet experiences in a very full and rich way. That’s the experience I’m looking for.

Cap posted this up on Friday, 16 November, 2007 at 15:16 and filed it under Uncategorized. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.