I have to give the team at Flock a lot of credit. The browser — which is built on Mozilla code, but has all kinds of added social features — has been through hell and back over the past couple of years. First, the initial release was weak, and got dumped on by just about everyone. Then Performancing released an excellent blogging plugin for Firefox (now called ScribeFire), and my friend Paul Kedrosky said Flock was, well… fucked.

Since integration with blogs was one of the big features that Flock brought to the table, there seemed to be a good chance that Paul was right. But Flock kept on plugging away. Not long after that, Firefox announced that it was going to add social features through something called The Coop, and I wondered whether Paul was even more right than before. But The Coop didn’t really fly (sorry) and Flock kept on adding features and plugging away. Now, the company has come out with version 1.0 of the browser, and I have to say that it is pretty interesting. It’s not perfect, of course, but it has a bunch of cool features.

Not everyone is going to want a browser with all sorts of add-ons, including a media bar — which displays Flickr photos and other stuff — and a “People” sidebar with links to your Facebook and Flickr and YouTube friends and their content. Some may find all the different tools and windows confusing. But for the social-media junkie (yes I’m looking at you, Fred) it brings together a number of different social threads in an interesting way.

You can see Facebook updates and photos with a click, scroll through Flickr photos, drag and drop your own photos on a friend in your People sidebar to share them, post something to a blog and even use your sidebar as a notebook for future blog posts, dragging and dropping images and text to it. Mike Arrington is right that Flock should be able to upload images to a blog server rather than just to Flickr or Facebook, but that shouldn’t be too hard to do. And apart from that, Flock 1.0 is pretty sweet. Karoli likes it too.

From Mike Arrington at TechCrunch comes news that the next version of Firefox will include social networking features — features that are described in more detail at the Mozilla labs website. The new features, which for some reason are called The Coop, have their own project page here.

As Mike points out, this is going to make things kind of sticky for Flock, the privately-funded browser built on the Mozilla framework. In effect, it sounds like the Firefox team is planning to build some or all of what Flock has done — sharing of photos, blogging, etc. — into the existing Mozilla browser, although there are differences (The Coop seems aimed at sharing rather than creating blog posts from within the browser, for example). Does this mean that Flock is fucked again, as my friend Paul Kedrosky put it back in late 2005 when Performancing added a blogging plugin? Not necessarily. In many ways, the social features almost seem like competition for del.icio.us rather than what Flock does.

Allan Stern of CenterNetworks says this kind of thing is a good illustration of why it`s not advisable to build your product entirely on someone else`s technology, which is a fair point. But I for one hope Flock and Firefox both continue to exist and become stronger and add new features. Like Mark Evans, I think the more competition the better.

According to a piece in Private Equity Week, the founder of Flock — the browser filled with Web 2.0 goodness wrapped around a chewy Mozilla center — has decided to leave and “pursue other opportunities.” According to the mag, Bart Decrem says that he is looking to move on and build another company, but that his sudden departure (in PE Week’s words) “isn’t tied to anything wrong with the company.” He will remain as chairman and a shareholder.

Valleywag isn’t the only one to smell a rat. Why would the founder move on and say he wants to build another company? He’s not even finished building the first one yet, for chrissake. It’s not as if Flock has become a massively successful enterprise and he can move on to bigger and better things — there’s still plenty of debate about whether there’s any point in developing another browser with Flickr and blog integration, since Firefox is so extensible. I like Flock, but it seems like a bunch of features tied together and disguised as a product.

A quote from Bessemer Venture Partners makes it sound like they need someone with talents Bart doesn’t have. Says general partner David Cowan:

This development has been anticipated since the day we started the company, and if it’s happening sooner than anyone expected, it’s only because of the traction we’re getting with partners that taxes the team for experience and resources.

Here’s Bart’s bio. He’s the former head of marketing and business affairs for the Mozilla foundation, and before that was involved with Eazel, a Linux desktop project. Pete Cashmore at Mashable wrote favourably about one of Flock’s recent initiatives: a private label version of its browser released in partnership with the photo-sharing site Photobucket.

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.