Well here we go. I have sent the alpha version of flock poker out into the wild. In all honesty it has been out there for about three weeks now and received a significant amount of fanfare for a pre-release( http://bit.ly/jPj4y and http://tinyurl.com/dbn7ql ).
I will start with a quick intro and then get into some of the motivations behind flock. You might ask yourself, “Great, just what the Internets needs, another f**king Poker application.” And, in truth, you would be correct. Online poker rooms have gotten a lot of bad press over the last 5 years. From shady accounting to questionable affiliate marketing tactics, even the biggest players in the online poker space play dirty. All to get your eyeballs and pocketbooks on their site.
It’s 2009. Microblogging is in full bloom with the advent of services like Twitter, Identi.ca, and Plurk. The “140 character revolution” has taken over the social web and is showing no sign of slowing down. So what are the Poker sites doing in response to the microblogging uprise? Or, for that matter the social media boom in general? Our idea was NOT to build another social network. There are already WAY too many social networks out there and convincing your pals to join another one just to enjoy a few rounds of poker just does not make sense. You’ve already got your friend / colleague / buddy / professional networks established on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Maybe the answer is to create a social application. OK, sure. The problem with a social app, is that you are still playing within the confines of your social net. The dream of Google’s OpenSocial is still in relative infantcy, and Facebook just won’t play nice with Google anyway. So we would have to cook up and maintain a different codebase for each one of the Social Networks and somehow try to manage and upgrade all of those systems. Might look something like this :
This is why we chose to build a poker app that puts the users in control. Flock Poker is a platform, not a site, designed to allow you to inject your own poker tables into your existing social network of friends via one simple link. It puts the power back into the users’ hands and lets you just have fun playing poker, without all of the headaches of rebuilding your social network.
I hope you like the public alpha. See you in the comments, or better yet, come see me at my table => http://flockpoker.com/beerme .
