I spent some time this weekend looking at Flock, the new Firefox-based browser with social networking hooks that include shared bookmaking via del.icio.us, shared photos via Flickr, and a built in blog posting tool. It's so far from being ready for everyday use that  it made me wonder what all the fuss is about.

A few reviews have slammed the release for so many unfixed bugs. Other try to peer through the murky haze to see the future incarnation of this tool. And, as near as I can tell, all this Sturm und drang was brought about because some lowlife who had access to the private test code leaked it out onto the P2P networks. The developers panicked and released this "technology preview" - prematurely if you ask me.

The ultimate impact Flock may have is hardly the point. The ill-advised rush  to form any kind of judgment concerns me a lot more.I've seen these paroxysms of "be first to post" and I find them generally unhealthy at best and highly destructive at worst.

For example, D. Keith Robinson, a writer and blogger whose work I generally enjoy quite a lot, asks the wrong question "Will Flock trump Firefox?" in a column at Publish today. Is that really the issue? I don't think so. Firefox has had a great run and now has been downloaded more than 100 million times. That's a significant level of market share and it's taken a long time to hit that threshold. Now, I do understand that there's more to market dominance than just the number of downloads - I'm not trying to be overly ornery or argumentative for its own sake.

Flock is an interesting idea. It combines some very viral, social practices and concentrates them into a familiar paradigm (the browser). Many of those who have found a way to make del.icio.us tags useful might enjoy the overt integration. The same hold true for some Flickr users. And the blogging bits might be interesting to others. But none of these things are particularly ground-breaking. In fact, you can build most of this functionality into Firefox right now using a number of extensions.

I think it was premature to release this code and I think it was released for all the wrong reasons. I fear that the developers overreacted to the leak of the early code and have done little or no good for themselves in the process. And many blogs have, I'm sorry to say, tried to make this an event and a harbinger of some sweeping change in the online universe when I suspect it will be nothing of the sort. There are plenty of good browser options available - Firefox, Opera, Maxthon, etc. - that offer much more stable experiences and that can be extended, to one degree or another, to provide today what Flock may one day deliver.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. I feel better now.