Flock – a new “Web 2.0” browser. And yes, those are sarcastic quotes. I don’t like the term.

Well, truth is I’m old. I’m in my 30’s now. Maybe I’m too old for this. Hell I can barely blog consistently. Anyways, Flock is this social interface browser, with bookmarks that link to del.icio.us (I love that clever url). And aparently a button to let you blog about whatever page you find yourself on. There’s some other stuff in there too, but I don’t get any of it. Maybe it does something to MySpace? I don’t know.

So, first, it’s very pretty, and very Designed. I like its icon. I don’t do del.icio.us, so I can’t speak to that. And I don’t usually blog about web pages, but Flock carefully autodetected my blogging software settings. So it all works how it should.

Except, who gives a shit? Why aren’t these things Firefox plug-ins? What the hell is the social web 2.0?

It’s the same as web 1.0 – schmoes can publish web pages. Blogging software means lazier and more ignorant schmoes can do it. So what. AJAX is nice, but I was doing stuff like that with hidden frames and iframes eons ago.

I feel like the dot-com era “cool kids” are back in action. I didn’t like them. I don’t like them now. New Paradigm! Disintermediate! Self-cannibalize! Blah blah. And now “Social Networking”. Feh.

I wish these young upstarts the best of luck. I’ll be putting their browser through its paces, so we’ll see if it’s any good, and I’ll even try to look into the ‘social’ features, but it’ll be an uphill battle.