Flock’s 1.1 Beta Has Arrived! And so I'm testing it (the last time was August 2005). I met my first semi-local Flock'er (Mark Lise) at the last DemoCampVancouver. They came back in force from Victoria to storm the Northern Voice conference (Flock was a sponsor).

At left, that's me watching Clayton Stark, the VP of Engineering, giving Marc Canter a demo, while myself, Rob Scales, and Dickt Hardt look on. Initial impressions (on my desktop PowerMac G5)

• Nice job on integrating Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and del.icio.us
• Oh, wait, I can set status message/tweet/whatever in the same predictable place??! Oh, um, please just build MoodBlast functionality in directly...and integrate Jaiku, of course
• delicious has links sorted by tag...my usage is most often by reverse chrono...can I toggle between a tag view and a recently added bookmarks?
• I added this Drupal aka Self hosted blog, but it seems I can't set the label of the blog (my username is the same on most sites, so a label like "bmann: blog" that is returned by auto discovery isn't going to help)
• The media bar mini-bar at the top for searching and browsing Flickr, and for drag/dropping into this blog editor, RAWKS!
• Yeah, I like the blog editor
• Some loads seem a little slow...but really, everything on my ancient, low memory PMac are slow...media bar and other stuff are saving me time
• OK, I'm now doing three blog posts at the same time...I don't think I can let go of this
• One more feature request: if I hit the "add link" button in the editor, and I've got a URL in my clipboard, please auto-fill it...kthxbye

If you hadn't heard of Flock the first time around, try it as a replacement (yep, replacement...) for Firefox. If you had gripes/crashes/etc. the first time, erase those memories and know that Canadian engineers are on the job and you should give it another try. With Firefox, you can add a bazillion plugins and do lots of functionality. Flock has it all integrated and smoothed out for lots of the social media services that people use already. Firefox is to Flock, as Drupal is to WordPress? Works for Mac, Linux, and Windows. Anyone else using it again / for the first time? I have some ideas of other things it COULD do, what do you think? (slight snafu in posting, but blog posts got autosaved / recovered. yay!) Disclaimer: my company may end up doing some work with Flock. Of course, we also just helped Spread Firefox recently

I found this post by Ian Hixie very interesting. At Bryght, we're looking at revamping our support ticketing and feedback process to more closely follow what we believe: that companies should value every ounce of feedback/suggestion/whatever that people choose to give them....wherever that feedback happens.

I found several posts giving suggestions and feedback on the WHATWG specs. But as far as I can tell, none of those messages were sent to the list.I've made a note of those posts so that I can make sure to incorporate the comments that were made, but please, if you have comments... send them to the list! Or to me! Leaving them on your Web log will not (unless I happen to run into those comments like I did those above) result in the spec improving. Your comments are welcome, whoever you are, and however minor or controversial you might think your comments are. Hixie's Natural Log: Message in a Bottle

So...how about using some of these fancy new blog search tools to find out what people are saying about you? You could even designate a blog entry to link to for different types of feedback (or even, vote with links -- link to different posts for different strategies).