I hung around barcamp for a little bit and had a nice conversation with Will Pate from Flock. In the nicest possible way he was like “What do women want?” If anyone has an extra day 1 blogher ticket, Will woudl like it. (SJ from I, Asshole also wants one!) So I babbled to him endlessly about what I want from my browser. It should vibrate.
Also! I want a pony! In my browser!
Talked about multiple/flexible identities and work environments. Social networking built into your browser… the difficulties with that. I forget whatall I said, but I thought of more things. For example, why am I ever cutting and pasting stuff, or URLs? Should be able to click on a page – right click it and email it off to someone, so that I can annoy all my family and friends with more “humorous forwards” and glurge. No, really! They want to be annoyed by me! I’m sure they’ve thought of that already though.
How about not just the tagging, which is handy… but a ratings bar for every page i look at? 10 stars… and I have the option to rank a page i’m looking at – very quickly and without waiting for some other window to pop up – just in my toolbar — and then at the end of the day I could see a list of my top ranked sites for that day. That would make browser histories automatically way more useful. As it is, I have a browser history that’s unwieldy and gross and not useful – but if I were to see the subset of pages I bothered to rank, that might be good. Is this different from tagging? … hell yes! Then, with social networking built in, scary! i coudl turn on the option (opt in) to let my friends see what my top ranked pages are and I could go look at their. I could push a button to send the list of links nicely marked up to a designated public blog that was just my top-rated links of the day, or the hour, or whatever. It could be all built in!
Don’t forget the pony…. OMG ponies!
Hey Liz,
Great meeting you at Barcamp. Thanks for all the ideas about how we can make Flock cooler, especially for women. I’ve passed your blog post on to the rest of the team so they can take a look too.
One thing you forgot to mention in your blog post that stuck out to me later was how important easily managing multiple levels of identity disclosure was to women, especially when you have to worry about weirdos who hang out on the intenet and love to creep out women. See, this is just the kind of thing we might have never realized on our own!
I know for sure we’re going to work hard on getting ponies in the browser too.
Cheers,
Will Pate
Community Ambassador, Flock