If ever there was a web browser for the Web 2.0 crowd that loves the idea of mixing and matching everything, Flock is it. I’ve been an avid Firefox user for about a year and a half now after finding it following numerous problems using Safari. Flock took my Firefox and pumped it with steroids. It also took all the new and socially connected web ideas and put them in one place. For starters, it imported all my saved bookmarks and passwords from Firefox, making the transition easy and painless. But all browsers are pretty good at this, right? What does Flock do for you?
Social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter are getting larger by the day. More and more people are intent on finding out what other people are up to. On Flock, you sign into your various social websites and it automatically keeps a sidebar of your friends’ updates. No more need to head to the site for the news feeds.
People love sharing pictures and video on the internet. Sign into YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, Piczo or Picasa, add friends, and open the streaming media sidebar that allows you to easily email or share links, pictures and videos without leaving the page you’re on.
Obviously, when you bring in the videos, pictures and friends, there’s usually going to be some blogging involved. Flock remembers all of your blogging accounts on Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, WordPress and Xanga, and lets you post to any of them from a simple pop up window on the side. It’s rough pulling together all the photos, links and articles for a blog post some times, which means that the WebClipboard sidebar where you can drag and drop things before adding them to blog posts makes things easy.
Don’t worry, Flock will handle your del.icio.us, Magnolia and Gmail and Yahoo Mail, allowing you to email webstyle or through your default mail application on your computer. Then, it compiles all of this into a “My World” tab that has all of your feeds, friends, blogs, and media streams at a glance. Don’t worry about finding things…in addition to the Google search bar, you can type in and search automatically to Ask, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon.
Below, you can see a picture of the window I’m working in right now. It’s got my facebook/youtube feed to the right, a media feed above (with Flickr search engine), tabs and bookmarks. Above the people sidebar, you can see where you click into the news feeds, media streams, blog posts and web clipboard. The ease of use is incredible…before, I would have had to upload this picture to the blog site and link it in. I took this screenshot on the computer, uploaded it in Flock and dropped it into the web clipboard. From there, I just dropped it into this blog box and here it is.
