Ever since Flock was founded, we have envisioned the role of the browser to be much greater than an application that simply lets you view your favorite websites. Throughout the many versions of Flock released to the public to date, we have focused on key innovations that help you stay connected with your favorite sites, people, media and content so that you can be a happier, more informed and plugged-in person.
OpenID is an open standard for shared authentication across many sites. Simply, it’s your free, single digital identity that you can use to sign up for and log into many sites without dealing with all the paperwork. This idea has been around for a while, but only until recently has there been a broad enough adoption of both OpenID providers as well as sites supporting OpenID.
Although there has been quiet momentum and support building across the web for OpenID for some time, it was the folks at Vidoop that identified the need for the browser to play a critical role as the common denominator to best serve as the broker between a user’s OpenIDs and the increasing number of sites that support this standard for authentication. Vidoop also founded the Identity In Browser open source project (IDIB) and championed the vision for a browser that could help users discover and manage OpenID’s easily from the comfort of their own browser view.
Flock was introduced to Vidoop by the good folks at MySpace, and without a moments delay a meeting between the three parties was put together at our offices in Victoria, B.C. Our engineers all agreed on the critical role that Flock could play in aiding the adoption and management of OpenID and the result of the brainstorm was an extension we’re calling “OpenID for Flock”. This extension is a reference design for better Discovery, and Management of Identity in the browser and is Flock’s flagship contribution to the IDIB project.
The OpenID for Flock extension is available on our own extension site, as well as on the IDIB group page. We encourage everyone to watch the video above, download Flock 2.0, and install the extension to experience how gratifying it is to traverse the web and log-in to sites seamlessly with the assistance of the OpenID standard.
We’ve enjoyed our collaboration with the MySpace and Vidoop team on this project, and look forward to hearing about your thoughts and interest in getting involved with this project.
Once you’ve had a chance to experience OpenID in Flock, we’d appreciate it if you would help spread the word about Flock and OpenID. The more sites that support the OpenID standard, the better the web becomes for all of us.
-Cheers
Dan Burkhart VP of Marketing at Flock
Get Flock and Meet Your New Favorite Browser
I want to clarify Flock's intentions and the new direction of the Flock extensions page, extensions.flock.com (EFC).
We haven't stopped hosting extensions, we've just simplified the back-end submission process, and content that we host. One of the great bonuses of this is our new ability to host Flock themes.
Flock still embraces extensions and themes, but we will leverage Mozilla's secure back-end hosting environment by encouraging you to get extensions from addons.mozilla.org. We’ll be dedicating our resources to responding to your needs and adding new and exciting capabilities onto the Flock browser.
The broad majority of Firefox extensions have always worked in Flock. Most Flockstars are aware of this and do not visit EFC for their extension needs. With the shift in focus to content that is Flock-specific, EFC now serves the niche that addons.mozilla.org does not: we provide extensions that enhance the many specific features that are unique to Flock.
Almost all of the developers that have their extensions removed from EFC had their extensions hosted on addons.mozilla.orgalready. We continue to support development of extensions for Flock and Firefox, and the developers who have interacted with EFC in the past continue to talk with us about the future of extensions for Flock. New developers are encouraged to check out our documentation and join us on IRC.
I hope this clarifies our position. You can still have all the feature benefits of Flock and take advantage of available Firefox extensions.
Community feedback is of the utmost importance to us and will always guide the development of Flock, our website, our extensions and our company. As always, I welcome your comments and emails.
Flock'n'roll,
Evan Hamilton Community Ambassador evan at flock dot com
I never got around to trying Twitter. It sounded interesting, but I am pretty busy (thanks to all you awesome Flockstars) and I figured it was something to check out whenever I take a vacation.
Flockstar Tony Farndon dropped me a line yesterday regarding a Twitterbar extension he had created. I figured it was as good an excuse as any and hastily set up an account on Twitter. It's nothing much, but I have to admit I love the idea...I'm constantly changing my quote on Gmail Chat, blogging, and throwing little updates into my profiles on different sites. This is just another extension of my personality and train of thought.
I’m pleased as punch to announce the release of the Flockstars extension. Ever-creative Flockstar Tony Farndon (tones) created this extension to connect Flockstars across the globe even further. Erwan and I gave it a few test runs and I'm really excited to let you guys at it. So here we go:
You remember those spread Flock buttons? Of course you do, you use them every day to promote your favorite browser. The Flockstars Extension upgrades these buttons to something much more powerful.
For people who aren’t yet using Flock, these buttons redirect them to Flock.com, just as the old ones did. But for Flock users (with the extension), these buttons activate a Flockstar icon in the address bar that connects you to their online life.
When moused over by Flock users, a short description pops up (as seen below).
When clicked, the Flockstars icon opens a list of said Flockstar's websites: Flickr, Photobucket, MySpace, Websites, Email, etc. Click their Flickr account and their photos load in the media bar, click their email and your email program opens. You can even click their Skype username and call them!
This is a tremendous new way to link you Flockstars together, and even more of a reason to get your friends to try Flock.
You can download and find out more about this extension on Tones' site and create your own Flockstar button here. You will need to install the extension as well as embed the button code on your page to see your Flockstar icon.
After installing, scope this extension out in action on these pages:
This should work with Cardinal, and I’ve had success using it on 0.7.10. Cormorant is ever-changing and not a good bet for any extension at the moment.
Hope you enjoy, and thanks again to Tony for putting this together. Awesome work.
Set yourselves up with a Flockstars button and comment with the URL so we can see this extension in action!
Flock on,
Evan Hamilton
Community Ambassador evan at flock dot com
(This extension is for Flock Cormorant only - the unstable version of Flock)
Just after Christmas, I started this extension as an experiment to see how hard it would be to put Flock’s blog editor in the bottom. It turned up to be pretty easy and require very few lines of code: the back-end is the same, as well as the rich editor based on Gecko’s <editor> widget. You can look at the source, it’s pretty short.
In short: the Conversation topbar will not be in Cardinal, grab the extension at the bottom of this page if you need it!
When I joined Flock in early 2005, I brought an extension with me: the Technorati topbar, or Conversation topbar, that I developed as a third party developer while I was still preparing my Ph.D. at Tokyo Metropolitan University. The Technorati topbar is a tool to see “who is talking about the page I am reading”. It was the first Flock-specific extension. Since it was a good example of the direction where the web is going, I received a lot of press for it, had dinner with a guy from Technorati in Tokyo, and I even heard that Bill Gates used it in demo at an internal Microsoft seminar.
Six months or so ago, I wrote the current version of Flock’s extensions site. It’s pretty simple and was intended to be simple. It wound up being even simpler than originally planned and has plenty of functionality hidden because we haven’t had a need for it or the ability to support it. We’ve thought a lot about various approaches to making extensions available, and I blogged some of those thoughts a few months ago. The quick summary is that we were waffling over whether to enforce quality for Flock extensions by officially hosting only a few or whether to have a free-for-all, or whether to blend the approaches. We ultimately decided on a blended approach, and we planned to launch a new extensions site in early February with the launch of the 0.5 release of Flock. For various reasons, that didn’t pan out.
