A Fresh Look at Flock
Remember Flock? Billing itself as the “social web browser,” Flock takes Firefox’s browser code and tightly integrates social networking tools within the application. While much of Flock’s functionality is already available through Firefox add-ons, Flock focuses on drag & drop usability of all those services. Nearly two years ago, Flock debut with a great deal of buzz. Unfortunately, the first public versions didn’t quite live up to that hype and the browser seemed to fade off the radar.
The developers have been working on a fresh release, now available as a public preview for both Mac OS X and Windows (Mac version is labeled as 0.8.99.1). Let’s take a peek.
Flock 0.9 features a redesigned interface, and it feels significantly faster than the 0.7 version did:
The first thing you want to do to fully utilize this browser is add the blogs, video, photo and social bookmarking sites you use. This is ridiculously easy to do in this new version. All you have to do is visit the page and sign in, and Flock will auto-detect your accounts and configure them for use within the browser. If you don’t want the browser to retain the account, you can easily tell it to forget the site. Seemed to work smoothly for the sites that I tried. Currently supported services include: Flickr, Photobucket and YouTube and Truveo for Media; Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, WordPress.com, and Xanga for blog editing (plus self-published Word Press and Movable Type blogs); and Ma.gnolia and del.icio.us for online favorites. Flock used to allow you to configure one account per service. Now the browser understands that many of us may have multiple accounts and they are all recognized. For example, I have separate Flickr accounts for work-related and personal photos.
Notably absent from this list are the new crop of presence applications such as Jaiku, Twitter or Pownce. I’m also surprised not to see any integration with Facebook-like or IM/chat services. Lacking these tools, Flock is evolving into a blogger’s browser, rather than the “social” browser it hopes to be.
“My World” is Flock’s start page that combines all services into one view. It’s a good start, but it’s no Netvibes or iGoogle. Still, it’s a handy way to get to Flock’s different features and services quickly. When you launch Flock for the first time, the applications offers to import Firefox data so startup is rather painless.
New Media Bar replaces the “photo bar” in Flock 0.7. Now more than just photos.
When you add services, Flock now lets you add multiple accounts within the same service. For example, I have access to 3 different Flickr accounts and Flock’s drag & drop window aggregates them all, plus favorite streams from other users. Adding media to accounts is drag & drop easy from right within the browser.
The blog editor works quite well for simple blogs posts…now enhanced by spell checking, drag & drop image editing from the media bar, tagging, and formatting previews.
The feed reader is disappointing. While it integrates with the new “My World” page, navigating feeds is awkward at best. Halfway between Firefox Live Bookmarks and an online reader like Google Reader or Bloglines, it needs a great deal of work.
Click here for an overview of what’s improved/changed from version 0.7 to 0.9.
Personally, I’m not ready for Flock to replace Firefox as my default browser. But it shows a great deal of promise as it heads towards 1.0. What do you think of the new & improved Flock?
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I installed Flock 0.8.99.1 for Mac yesterday. I instantly fell in love.
Although I was a big user of Firefox on Windows, since I switch to the Mac I dropped it, manly because I found it slow (to say the least). In Mac I started using Safari that delivers well but is, well, boring. Camino could be a nice browser but I consider it boring too and with a big lack of add-ons. I tried Opera and liked some things including the note taking, the mail integration and the widgets… but, still, I couldn’t make the jump. I also tested the new alpha of OmniWeb which is quite appealing and super fast; in fact I was ready to dump 15 US$ when I decided to give Flock another chance (I had tried 0.7 and didn’t find it that great).
Oh, my… The capacities and, specially, the potential! I’m a blogger and I use del.icio.us and ma.gnolia as my support on the blog. P.E.R.F.E.C.T. I’m looking forward to future developments: it’s on the right track!
I tried using Flock for 3-4 months some time ago. Gave up… returned to the real Firefox for any number of reasons.
i DO actually like it, but … have you tried running it for the canonicals 8 hours of work with many tabs opened ?
after a while it eats out an awful LOT of RAM, at least on my 2GB macbook and 1,5GB linux (centos) machine
so, sometimes it’s still a memory hog for slower machines or with “few” RAM …
I tried it a while back, maybe a year or so ago, and was disappointed to see that it had re-edited the creation dates on all my del.icio.us bookmarks.
When any software edits my data, I want to know about it. After seeing the effect it had on my archive of bookmarks, I decided it was not worth any more similar surprises.
Flock is an interesting concept but it’s delivery and, frankly, the company’s voice and presence online are extremely hyperbolic — a lot of what’s wrong with the whole Web 2.0 vibe, to be truthful.
To each his own.
I use Flock for a long time. I know it’s heavy and sometimes buggy, but this new version is making my eyes sparkle!
The good think about Flock is the easy fun! Just Drag and Drop Fun!
And I really really love the smalls thinks like snippet bar and multiple fav bars.
I will give a try in the new one!