What the...Flock?

You may have noticed the little message at the bottom of most of my posts referencing Flock. It's a new Mozilla based browser that I've been playing with and testing out. For those unfamiliar with the term Mozilla, you may be more familiar with Firefox - probably the most popular Mozilla based browser to date.

Flock is a browser that is literally tailored to the social browsing experience. Embedded into the default "My World" "Homepage" are links to Favorites, RSS feeds, quick links to various blogging services (Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogsome, Typepad, Wordpress.com), picture hosting services (Photobucket, Flickr, Piczo) , and media services (YouTube). Online favorites like del.icio.us is also supported.

Adding a website to your favorites is as easy as clicking on a button. Literally. There's a large star button where you would normally see the large stop button in Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox (FF). And, in fact, I haven't yet figured out how to stop a page loading, and have instead added the same site several times to my favorites list because I was trying to stop said page from loading. *laugh*.

There's a very basic blogging client that is service agnostic. You write your post, then choose which blog to post to during the publishing stage...you can have as many blogs as you would like associated with your installation of Flock, all you need to do to activate an account within Flock is log in to your blog/journal service. It's the same with adding any of the above types of services to your Flock environment regardless of whether it's a media service, photo sharing service, or blogging service, etc...

But the above only scratch the service of some of the best features of Flock, in my opinion. Where I see some of the real benefit has to do with media sharing. Between the ease of uploading pictures to photo sharing services, the media bar, and the web clipboard...sharing information in a social manner could not be any simpler.

There are drawbacks, of course. Flock's interface is different from IE's or FF's...so learning to navigate around the new buttons and windows was at first a little intimidating, even for someone who likes to click buttons and dig around a fair bit. But once you get to experience some of the bells and whistles, you won't want to go back to the other browsers.

Unfortunately, for the professional geek like me, not going back is not an option. *chuckle*

Blogged with Flock