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?

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post