Extensions

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.

Hey Flockstars,

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:

http://spatialviews.com/
http://www.myspace.com/flockbrowser
http://www.myspace.com/evan_hamilton
http://www.myspace.com/monstersarenotmyths
http://ghismo.blogspot.com/

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

Get it here: Lower Blog

People who used Flock 0.5 probably know that there used to be a maps topbar. It’s no longer present in Flock 0.7, but I packaged it as an extension.

You can download it from here.
The Technorati topbar is also available, here.

technorati tags:flock, maps, technorati, extensions

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.