Flock beta rocks (NewsForge) [LWN.net]

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 17, 2006 15:47 UTC (Sat) by NapalmLlama (guest, #26327) [Link]

Enter Google.

They probably won't provide P2P, but you can already chat from inside Gmail, and write documents and spreadsheets online...

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 17, 2006 22:02 UTC (Sat) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

all using toy apps that are amusing to try out once but have almost no value and very few return visitors. do you know anyone who is using their spreadsheet for serious work? writely for serious documents?

the web stack was never intended to be an traditional application delivery platform. from the protocol on up through the layout, display, and event layers, it was designed for robustness and simplicity in its chosen role - content delivery.

i don't see much of a threat even to openoffice in these tools, let alone microsoft office.

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 17, 2006 22:19 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Google Spreadsheets are less then two weeks old, Writely is less than year old. I know enough guys who are using Writely for short notes, collaboratively written documents and so on. Just not for "business critical stuff". Understandable: If someone is using such immature beta-version of software for "serious work" - he's clearly insane.

As for threat... time will tell. I've heard exactly the same noises about "real mailers" few years ago (web browser will never be good enough to replace emacs/mutt/thunderbird/etc) - but today there are more gmail users among my friends then, for example, emacs and mutt users combined (even if they are using emacs for document editing they prefer "available from any internet-kiosk" availability of Gmail over convinience of traditional MUA). Now: I'm not telling "universal availability" of Writely will force such switch among office suite users. That's unknown at this stage. But to claim that "it'll never happen" is somewhat premature.

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 18, 2006 5:06 UTC (Sun) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

i wouldn't count email clients as fodder for comparison. offline or online, they have always been relatively simple apps - a form fill and a submit.

the webmail clients succeed because emails tend to be small documents, which is not the case with business spreadsheets and documents. the DOM was never meant to contain large datasets like this...while system resources are growing, no one is going to accept having to buy a gamer-class system to edit a document.

but resource use is not the only issue. the web stack was simply never designed to perform this kind of task. while it is possible to shoehorn the functionality of a local-system app into a javascript API, there isn't any added value. we already have the office apps we need, its a settled market. how much more free than free can google office be?

of course it goes without saying that you would be nuts to store sensitive data in a webservice repository, with no assurance or support, storage, or privacy.

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 18, 2006 18:36 UTC (Sun) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]

"the webmail clients succeed because emails tend to be small documents, which is not the case with business spreadsheets and documents. the DOM was never meant to contain large datasets like this."

Certainly nobody would ever consider using it to interact with terabytes of map and satellite data....

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 19, 2006 16:53 UTC (Mon) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

you're right - this is why google earth is not a web site :)

google maps does not load terabytes of data - at any given time you are only seeing a small portion. by the same token a web search only shows you a few KB of a multi terabyte index.

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 18, 2006 18:53 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Gamer-class system ? Don't make me laugh. Yes, in the past Excel used 1/10 (or may be 1/100) of resources required to open the same thing in Google Spreadsheet. Today... With OOo 2.0 and Excel v12 ? I'm not so sure. On the other hand my pocket system (the venerable OQO) can work huge spreadsheets in browser, Excel 2007 or OOo 2.0 - and the strange thing is that I need roughly the same amount of resources (insane amount by 1990th viewpoint but available today in my pocket!). Sure: with Excel 2007 or OOo 2.0 they are needed to manage overbloated codebase and with Google Spreadshit they are needed to manage ineffective language (Javascript) but the end result is more or less the same. And as for JavaScript... Who knows what future will bring ? How about python ? Time will tell...

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 19, 2006 16:11 UTC (Mon) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

You won't be seeing Python available for client side scripting any time soon -- the Python developers don't consider the sandboxing code secure these days (it wasn't used much, and holes grew in it as Python evolved).

There was support for Python scripting in IE through the ActiveScripting interface, but this was disabled in later versions of the Windows Python bindings for these reasons (it is still available for server side scripting).

If PyXPCOM gets integrated into the default Gecko builds, it will likely be restricted to privileged code for the same reasons (e.g. available to Firefox extensions but not web pages).

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 18, 2006 5:47 UTC (Sun) by TwoTimeGrime (guest, #11688) [Link]

> do you know anyone who is using their spreadsheet for serious work?

I am. All my work is serious. I don't use spreadsheets for entertainment. It might not be as complex as what you do in a spreadsheet. But I imported my monthly budget spreadsheet into Google and have been using it. It works fine for what I'm doing. I'm sure the spreadsheet site works fine for for many many other people as well. I might put my other spreadsheets in there too.

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 18, 2006 8:56 UTC (Sun) by micampe (guest, #4384) [Link]

all using toy apps that are amusing to try out once but have almost no value and very few return visitors.

Any data to back this up?

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 20, 2006 6:19 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

yes, look at the traffic chart for writely before, during and after the google acquisition period. talk about a one time spike!

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 17, 2006 23:57 UTC (Sat) by rmstar (guest, #3672) [Link]

I'd say it is an ADD-as-a-lifestyle app.

"Right click to blog"? That is pretty sick.

Flock beta rocks (NewsForge)

Posted Jun 18, 2006 1:12 UTC (Sun) by philips (guest, #937) [Link]

> "Right click to blog"? That is pretty sick.

Probably I evaluate that thing improperly. My POV seems to be often misaligned. My first impression was that main aspect of Flock is integration of otherwise unintegrated web services (services from different providers). Blogging/photos/bookmarks are just few of the web services. But there are many others. First.

Second. For many non-geek people, "posting photos" is about 75% of what they do on-line. (And it's 75% of time only because that's not straight forward.) Several my friends use Flock specifically as tool to help with their photos/blogs on-line. Without Flock, getting thru all the hurdles making a good post on blog was more or less impossible for them. Unexpectedly, many my friends were found to blog and were quite interested in Flock.

It's just a tool. As web browsers/servers made several steps to abstract tools from desktops, now Flock "strikes back" and brings the tools back to desktop. Data remain on servers and users get slick GUI. What could be better?

Data ownership

Posted Jun 20, 2006 0:04 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

What could be better?

Owning your own data? I can imagine a lot of circumstances where having your data up on a public server can be dangerous. In fact, having a gmail account makes me uncomfortable sometimes. Am I paranoid or just cautious? I don't know, luckily my private life is not very interesting :D