- Amy

I’ll post more later about my discontent with your people sidebar. A bit too slammed to do it today. Will let you know when that’s up.

Thanks for being so responsive on this!

- Amy Gahran

Here’s my one big pet peeve about Flock:

The blog writing tool inserts “span style=’bold’” and “span style=’italic’” instead of strong and em. This hurts me to my very soul.

Since the Flock people

p.s. Amy, my latest post to IdeaLab was going to be about Flock, but somehow Flock got passed over entirely. I plan to revisit it but am wondering if you’re planning to bring your Flock analysis there.

Flock 1.1 hit public beta today. You can grab the beta at http://www.flock.com/beta/download . The full version will be out in the next month or so, depending on how many bugs are found.

I’ve added exporting favorites as .html to our FAQ at http://flock.com/faq/show/30#q_61211

I think after my long post I deserve a better explanation as to what you don’t find functional about the People sidebar. As I said, most people do like it (http://flock.com/news/list) so I’m curious as to how you’re not finding it functional.

Flock on,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Re: Feed reader — Yes, if you’d have it remember how I left my feed folders, that’s a step in the right direction. However, it would be even better to allow users to select a default preference to collapse (or expand) all folders — or at least provide a collapse/expand all button or menu option.

When is this fabled Flock 1.1 due out?

Thanks for explaining how to export favorites to HTML via the favorites manager. I tested that on the mac, and it did work. I couldn’t find that instruction on your site, you might want to make it more obvious.

RE: Social media — keep trying. Maybe it’ll get more functional as you continue. Worth a shot.

- Amy Gahran

Great feedback. We’re always trying to make Flock better, and stuff like this is key in doing so. Some responses below.

-Feed Folders Open-
Flock 1.1 will remember whether you left these opened or closed, which is a much-needed improvement. Having them by default be open or closed is not something we plan to do, but I will take it into consideration (most people prefer to have it stay as they left it, which, as I mentioned, will be possible in 1.1).

-Grouping by Most Recent Feed-
Makes sense to me. I will put it on the feature request list.

-Exporting Favorites as HTML-
You should be able to do this by going to Favorites>Favorites Manager>File>Export (on Windows…may be a slightly different path on Mac). Let me know if that is not working.

-People sidebar-
Sorry to hear that you dislike this feature…it’s the one that most people love.
We don’t have a list of upcoming services until we know they’re going to be able to be successfully integrated. The only officially announced upcoming service to be integrated is MySpace, but we spend a lot of time collecting community feedback about what else should go in the sidebar. If you have a suggestion, let me know and I will log your vote.

You can respond to tweets (and post tweets) by clicking your latest tweet under your username. Obviously this is hard to find, and in 1.1 we will be adding an “edit” button to make it more obvious.

Reading full tweets is tricky…I totally understand your want to be able to do this (I use Twitter all the time), but we’re also working within the confines of a sidebar designed for multiple other social networks. It’s something we’re definitely ruminating on, but we haven’t found a solution for yet.

I’m sorry to hear that you haven’t gotten a response in our support forums yet. We’re in the process of hiring a full time support person so that posts on that forum don’t fall through the cracks.

Thanks again and Flock on,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

I tried Flock for about a week and found that I still liked Firefox more. Maybe because of familiarity, maybe because of usability, can’t quite put my finger on it.

I agree about both the cool factor of the feed reader and the lame factor of the social networking feature. However, I still prefer to just use Bloglines as my reader, the Twitter integration is pretty much worthless & it’s simply easier to just go to Facebook to check in there.

It’s got a great shiny look and interface, but for sheer utilitarian value, I’m sticking with Firefox.