I’m very sorry to hear that you’re leaving Flock. I think you raise some valid points here, and I’d like to speak to them below.

Social Bookmark Integration

Keep in mind that you are a power user…most people don’t use online bookmarking, and if we started publishing their bookmarks online by default, they’d probably freak out. That said, Flock 2 will eliminate one of these levels of navigation to get to your online favorites: they’ll now be listed in a folder, rather than a whole new section. It’s still not completely ideal, but it’s a bit better. Additionally, I believe I’ve heard that the Yahoo! delicious extension does work in Flock 2.

Blog Editing

It’s actually within Flickr’s Terms of Service that you have to link back to Flickr, which we respect with our image embedding. We also figure this is a nice thing to do for all images: stealing images from other peoples’ sites without permission isn’t nice, so we assume that most people are ok linking back. If not, that’s what the source tab is for.

Gmail

Perhaps you missed the Webmail icon, which is under the refresh icon. It’s pretty small, so I can understand that. Clicking this icon will provide you with a list of recent email, the ability to refresh that list, compose a message, or hop to your inbox. I can understand how if you didn’t find that, our integration would seem pretty lacking.

Photo Management

You, like me, probably spend most of your time on the computer in an area with internet. It’s hard to remember that not everyone has wireless everywhere, and some people even still have dial-up! The advantage to Flock’s Photo Uploader (and Blog Editor, and Feed Reader) is that you can prepare your photos while offline, without having to load a heavy web interface. This is very valuable if you are away from a connection but still want to get your photos ready to publish.

Media Bar

Perhaps you missed the arrows on the left and right of the Media Bar that allow you to quickly scan through a photo stream, or the “Filter this stream” option in the search box that allows you to search it.

RSS

I can totally understand this not working for some people. I’ve heard both sides of the coin on this feature…people just use RSS differently. I’m glad to hear you found it eaasy to switch to Greader!

People

Maybe this is just not your cup of tea. Many people find it very useful to be able to view and share with their social networks without them taking up a whole web page. Try dragging a photo, link, or text to a friend in the sidebar, I think it might open up a whole new world for you.

MyWorld

I’ll be the first to admit that MyWorld is not as customizable as iGoogle or Netvibes. Right now, MyWorld is more of an aggregator of what you do in Flock, not a true online portal page. That may change in the future.

Performance

Flock is based off of the technology powering Firefox 2. Obviously we’re a bit heavier because of all the features layered on top. You’ll be happy to hear that Flock 2 (coming out later this year) is powered by Firefox 3 and has significantly better performance. If you’d like to try the beta, you can get it at http://www.flock.com/beta/download

As I finish writing this (ginormous) comment, I realize that a lot of your complaints are covered by features we have that you missed. This is obviously concerning…you shouldn’t need a Flock employee to tell you why Flock is good or where our features are!

Do you have any thoughts on how we could make these features easier to discover? We’re constantly reviewing our UI, but an external perspective is always helpful. How can we make it easy for you to discover all of Flock’s features on your own?

Thanks for taking the time to write this up…we really do appreciate getting the feedback, even if it indicates we still have some work to do.

Flock’n'roll,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com