Danie's dashboard

Found the problem.... the versions page links to 2.5.1 but when clicking on the button to download Flock from the home page it still downloads 2.5 only (for Linux at least). – Danie, on July 29, 2009 18:56

I downloaded it from the Flock website but the download file shows 2.5 and so does the version after I install it. Should it now show 2.5.1 in the download file?

Hi Evan, more than one thread now points to this, but at that link it says that thread is buried. This is confusing people I think and more threads may be started as a result. We need one active thread (that is not buried) to track this. – Danie, on July 07, 2009 22:34

Had this problem for more than a month now with Flickr in the sidebar. Tried the steps above and no difference. All my other services work fine but Flickr is the main reason why I use Flock..... really need this fixed. My girlfriend only uses Flock for her Flickr uploads and she is completely stuck right now....

True it is more than just an aggregator and I think we all use it slightly differently depending on where our main social network activities are. Point is FriendFeed itself does give you control over whether and what you want to aggregate or want to push out. In my own case I found FF pushed too much to Twitter so I rather push via Ping.FM but its not a problem as I can decide where I want to do what.

Its maybe a question of just how we would like to see FF integrated into Flock - what functionality do we want to see working with FF inside Flock and what views should we see? What value would Flock offer as a browser working with FF insted of us just going directly to the FF site?

Thanks Evan, yes I agree it does not have to be FriendFeed but Flock would need to achieve the following:
1. A way of aggregating a friend's activity across various services. Flock does cover many popular services already but remember the friend will very likely not be a Flock user. FriendFeed does this by allowing you to create an imaginary friend and then add various services to that friend by specifying their user names on the services. This will give you an overview of that person's activities across various accounts. FriendFeed has 59 services listed.
2. Publishing or making an RSS feed available of own activity - we should be able to have this as an option. Then any other friend can subscribe to our feed and get an aggregated view. Flock already knows what services we are subscribed to so this would be the easiest to achieve but bear in mind this type of aggregation must obtain the updates directly from those services (even if I'm uploading via my mobile device to say Flickr) to be truly effective.

I am wondering then based on the above whether all this belongs within Flock as a browser? Maybe it may be worth thinking about integrating FriendFeed into Flock as an account - Flock would offer the functionality of reading the virtual feeds (imaginary friends) from FriendFeed and displaying them on a "My World" type page view within Flock. Or on the FriendFeed account view it would display a list of all your FriendFeed imaginary friends and you could click on each one to get the view of activity.

Alternatively Flock would have to go through a process of allowing us to link our friends from each service within Flock to each other. In other words it checks all my friends on Flickr and asks me to match them up with the same friend where they appear in the other services. This may be a bit tricky in terms of user setup.

See also my comment elsewhere on this site regarding pushing single status updates out from Flock. This may also be a big plus as far as aggregation goes and a quicker win. FriendFeed type functionality was more of a pull type service for aggregation.

I see Friendfeed more as an aggregator of all my online social network activity - a single RSS feed is available to my friends regarding what I have done where. Facebook is catching up now in terms of this with many new services it will follow, but Friendfeed still has a far broader services base that it follows. So I would understand Friendfeed integration more as a single view of all my friends' activities across the different services. Right now on Flock we see that on a per service / social network basis.

Yes I agree strongly. We have all these services but no integrated way of updating our status. I use Ping.FM exclusively to update all my statuses from my browser as well as my mobile device during the day. Thing is that Ping.FM is good at what they do and allow for many services as well as multiple means of updating. So they cater for other services as well as updates from mobile devices (latter which Flock will not be able to cater for within the browser).

Flock may want to introduce the service as an option between pushing the update to registered accounts on Flock, and offering the option to just push the updates straight to Ping.FM and let Ping.FM do the distribution.