Way back in early high school, I remember folks tossing around the notion of “Internet 2.” It was going to be some extraordinary thing that mad scientists in China were developing behind our backs and would one day use to take over the world.

It turned out to be just a bunch of new protocols for high speed transfer and things like multicasting.

Of course, consumers could care less about the technical specs. BitTorrent has nearly all the power of a true multicast, and yet is implemented strictly in Internet 1 technologies.

Web 2.0

It’s 2005. Goodbye Internet 2, hello Web 2.0: A non-specific complement applied by bloggers to whatever sites and services they deem worthy. Whatever Web 2.0 is or isn’t, it seems to me that the stuff acquiring the “Web 2.0″ label seems to fall into one or more of four loose categories:

• Services which expose vast quantities of valuable data through easy-to-use protocols. (Amazon, Flickr, Google Maps)
• Services where much of the data is contributed- and “owned”-by the community. (Wikipedia, Delicious, Digg, etc.)
• Sites which aggregate or “mash up” publicly available data. (Technorati, innumerable GMap mashups)
• Products using lots of Javascript to create a more seamless user experience. (Writely, Mint)

Okay, so hype. So far, so good.

Along Came Flock

Then something else appeared. Flock, a Firefox flavour containing a bunch of hacked-in features for Web 2.0-y stuff; integrated tools for blogging, photo management, and social bookmarking. Cool.

Now, Scrivs has already declared Flock DOA, and others have expressed skepticism about the business model. (Can you really pay twelve developer salaries on the price of Yahoo as the default search?)

Quite apart from these logistical concerns (being broke; having no users), I see a fundamental philosophical problem with Flock: Lock-in. Part of the charm of Firefox is the roll-your-own browser concept. Part of Web 2.0 is the “indie” appeal of mashups—sites combining info from specialized sources. But should the browser itself be a mashup? Isn’t the point of a plugin that it does only one thing, but does it well? With all this stuff integrated, how can we get small pieces, loosely joined?

Flock comes with integration to Delicious and Flickr built-in. But what if you use fURL for link management instead? Is every new Web 2.0 rising star going to see the Flock developers scurrying to implement a different API?

The Market

So there’s some appeal in simplicity: Rather than tracking down your twenty Firefox extensions, you just install Flock once. But is that really worth the trade-off? What about when Flock goes stale, and someone else writes a better link management extension? Do we install that on top of Flock’s built-into-the-core tool?

Wouldn’t the “Flock Idea” (a Web 2.0 browser) be better served by a centralized resource that tracks and publicizes high-quality extensions for interacting with Web 2.0 services? Or perhaps proposes common Javascript object layouts for standard types of entities, so that mashup plugins are less tied-down?

And really, shouldn’t this all be someone’s weekend project, and not a company burning through $2M in venture capital?

Maybe they’ve got a brilliant plan; I’d be thrilled to find out that they really are going to change the browsing experience….

But you’ve gotta admit, between the Web 2.0 Buzz Generator and the Web 2.0 Company Generator, it gets harder to take the hype seriously.

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 7:47 am to Internet.