Eek.

Well, it appears that the Flock website has been completely overwhelmed. There are some pretty hideous link bugs in their forums, which makes it virtually impossible to get help with their  software. I do like the program -- I hesitate to call it a browser because it's a lot more than that -- but I've had some glitches that I want to talk about on their forums. That's kinda hard when the site is fooked. And instead of taking the site completely off-line to get stuff fixed, everything sort of works until all of a sudden you find out it doesn't (like when you post a message to the forum that's not actually saved and you get taken to some random hub page that's got wacked formatting!)

But overall, I give their public beta product 3/5 stars, knowing that there's a lot of polish that just can't be added until the shakeout. However, I did find one MISSION CRITICAL bug in their OSX version that makes the product unusable in certain situations. I'm able to work around that if necessary for the time being.

NOW, as for their ability to plan for and deal with the unwashed hordes that clog their website - they missed that one completely and they're still having terrible problems with their forum and some icky display issues on various pages of their site. For that they get a shabby 1/5 stars.

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and once they get past this initial hurdle maybe things will be better. My only fear is the knowledge that the general public is hardly forgiving and they may have shot themselves in the foot with such public announcement of their public beta (I picked it up from TechCrunch - where did you see them?). They're going to have a long road to travel to get back lost ground from this setback, I expect.

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