It’s too bad that the popularity of Performancing.com’s blogging extension for Firefox seems to have turned into an anti-Flock thing, because I don’t think it has to be that way. I know people tend to see things in a kind of binary way — Performancing is great, so Flock is f***ed, as Paul Kedrosky so eloquently put it — but I think there’s plenty of room for both, or at least I hope so (Paul takes another crack at his thoughts on Flock here).
Chris Messina, who is Flock’s ‘director of experience and open source ambassador’ (that’s quite the title, Chris), has written an impassioned defence of where he thinks Flock is going, and why it makes sense. He makes some good points, but I also liked his comment on Paul’s blog, where he says: ‘I hope you get a lot of traction out of Performancing. It’s a decent piece of work and I’m excited to see more Firefox folks getting into blogging. Flock isn’t going to be for everyone and nor will Performancing. Isn’t it nice to have choice on the web again?’ (Miss Rogue over at horsepigcow has another take that I quite enjoyed).
People like Mike at TechCrunch shouldn’t feel like they have to come to Flock’s defence. The company and the app came under some fire for the early hype, and an initial version that was a lot more alpha than beta, but that’s the way things go. I’ve tried the Performancing extension too, and I think it is fantastic — and I must admit it made me question the need for a whole separate browser too. But we shouldn’t get religious about these things. I’m going to keep checking out Flock.com to see if they can change my mind. Choice is good.