What Flock Should Offer Immediately

Last night I wrote about the new 2.5 release of the Flock social browser. We know that Flock targets the over-sharing crowd but is that in itself enough to make the company very successful? I started to think about how Flock could gain more mainstream acceptance and help push Flock further along in the browser wars. What follows is my suggestion for the company.

Flock should develop a “lite” or “simple” version of their browser. Currently their browser can be overwhelming to the average mainstream Internet user and it frankly probably scares a lot of people away after the initial load. What I’d like to see are three new “lite” versions:

• Flock with Twitter panel
• Flock with Facebook panel
• Flock with Twitter and Facebook panels

That’s it. No MySpace, no Bebo, no Flickr, none of it. Just a browser that includes a sidebar for Twitter and/or Facebook. There are plenty of new social desktop applications like Tweetdeck but these also focus on the over sharing crowd.

Now imagine a browser that takes the simple Twitter.com interface plus a browser and combines them together. Flock 2.5 allows you to easily drag-and-drop items from the browser to Twitter/Facebook and that functionality should remain. That’s what I think Flock Lite should be. Nice and simple which will appeal to the mainstream, average Facebook/Twitter user. I’d also like to see an installation wizard that makes setting up the browser amazingly easy. Over time Flock can move the user to the full Flock browser.