Flock Biz Model: Solve problems; Dont shaft users
- By: John Andrews [privmsg - website] On 24th Oct 2005 In
[url=http://www.decrem.com/bart/"]Bart Decrem[/url] offered an answer to the Bubble2.0 "no business model" debate with respect to Flock. Is this a real innovation, or perhaps just a well-engineered link bait/PR initiative seeking a slice of Web2.0 Bubble Pie? Based on my read, last time Bart missed the boat by a few months.
He notes how much money is being made in search-related activities such as Mozilla's Google arrangement:
Opera’s CEO recently explained that his company was able to release the browser for free thanks to an expanded search sponsorship arrangement with Google. The Mozilla Foundation has alluded to search related business arrangements and has created a for-profit subsidiary. These success stories show that even simple search “distribution” integration points in the browser can provide a solid financial footing for browser providers...
He refers to profitable AdSense programs:
Huge businesses (like AOL Search) and thousands of niche online ventures alike are built around Google and Yahoo’s adword programs. These same business models are now providing the financial footing for web browsers.
And he alludes to the affiliate and spam/spyware space as well:
While there’s certainly money to be made from stripmining users, as proven by the numerous malware providers and established mainstream companies that routinely abuse their customers’ trust, we believe that, over time, the most successful companies will be those that earn their users’ trust and focus pretty obsessively on solving problems for those users.
So in summary, here's the business plan for Flock:
We plan to make a ton of mistakes, listen to our users, focus on building the best product that meets our users’ needs. Where there are obvious, proven, opportunities to generate revenues in ways that respect our users’ privacy and don’t hinder the user experience, we will pursue those.
Bart's got a Law degree from Stanford, has been part of Mozilla and Open Source for a long time, and according to his bio he coordinated the Spread Firefox viral marketing campaign. Everyone has been hyping Flock even though it has barely made beta. Slashdotted in advance and again almost immediately after a developer preview, you can't deny the popular appeal of a new browser, and the PR that's gone into Flock.
So I wonder.... sure the browser space has been stagnant for a while, so it seems "calm". But did the complexities of building a cross-platform, standards-compliant, user-friendly FREE browser go away? Does it now seem much easier to go up against Microsoft, with free IE pre-installed on every Windows desktop? Or perhaps Firefox's < 10% share and Opera becoming free won't hurt the commercial possibilities?
I dunno.
This sounds somewhat like
This sounds somewhat like GOOG in the old days no?
Get a couple million users under their belt and watch them take the dark path heh...
What the Flock?
When I HERD about FLOCK (bad pun intended) I downloaded it and maybe I'm missing the point of what it does, or doesn't do, but it looks like way more hype than substance.
After playing around with it I was left scratching my head -
This is it?
That's all it does?
I think they need to go get laid as this was a waste of a lot of late nights IMO.
got to agree
got to agree with IncrediBILL, WTF is it with Flock, maybe its just me but I don't get it,its just Firefox with a really bad blogging app added and the ability to post stuff to delicious.
from the blog
Just like CopyURL Firefox extension that Nick likes so much?
........ I don't need another
I blog, I don't need another blogging tool
I read rss feeds, I don't need another rss feed reader
I keep bookmarks, I don't need another bookmart repository
Show me something new and I will get excited.