Rik Abel

Flock | the social web browser

I just installed version 1.0 of Flock, a ’social web browser’ based upon Firefox, and my initial impressions are that I am totally impressed and blown away. Aside from the fact that it is apparently much more stable than Firefox (which I’ve kept using as I am so dependent on Firebug) the integration of your various social tools/sites (Facebook, flickr, YouTube, twitter and more…) is seamless and beautiful. For example, I’m writing this blog post inside Flock. Once you have logged in to your blogging account you can just right-click on any web page and select ‘Blog This’ and away you go! But it gets better…

Assuming you are a facebook addict, just log in to facebook and all your friends will appear in the Flock ‘People’ sidebar. You can then keep track of updates, message, poke, change your status etc without leaving your browser, which is nice. The same applies for twitter.

But it gets even yet still more betterer…

If you log-in to your flickr account (or piczo or photobucket), you can then see a ‘media toolbar’ along the top of your browser window with all your flickr photos, which is nice. Say you want to share a photo with a facebook or twitter friend - simply drag and drop the photo onto their name in the sidebar and voila, flock automagically creates a message directing them to said photo. How cool is that? Alternatively you can click the arrow icon on a photo in the media bar and choose to blog it, email it, or get a link to the image or a bb url…haha! All this also applies for your YouTube videos as well - just toggle between which ‘media stream’ you want to see in the media bar. But it isn’t just your accounts you can view in the media bar, you can also subscribe to media feeds for your friends or indeed for any user of any of these services.

But wait, there is more! Flock also has a built in RSS reader. And a built in photo uploader which can upload to flickr, or piczo, or facebook…

AND, it plays nicely with FireBug, so I am a very happy camper.

Flock does genuinely seem to deliver almost seamless integration of your various social software services within the browser - I haven’t been as excited by a piece of web technology for, ooh, several weeks. It remains to be seen how stable it really is, and what other services they will support (I’m thinking last.fm) but my initial impressions having played with it for the last hour, while configuring it and writing this post, is that is, in a nutshell, extremely impressive.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, browser, web 2.0, social, sharing, social browsing

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