Flock, the "social" Web browser, made waves when it was released several months ago in beta. The browser, based on Mozilla Firefox, incorporates several blogging services, social networks, and Web services like Blogger, Twitter, and Flickr so you can browse and update your social media, bookmarks, and communities easily while surfing the Web.
The developers behind Flock have released a 1.0 beta, indicating that the social browser is finally ready for prime time. Flock makes it easy to update your blog, see your del.icio.us bookmarks, and browse your friends Flickr photostreams in the same window, but will people rush to adopt it over other browsers out there?
The past few months have been full of work for the Flock development team, since their first release received mixed reviews. Critics pointed out that the browser was built on Firefox, was fast and fully featured, and included access to a number of popular social networks and Web services, but wondered who the target audience was, and why people would download Flock, rather than the plug-ins and add-ons that each of the services already made for other browsers. That question has never really been answered, but the new Flock 1.0 beta may give people who love to blog, are addicted to their social bookmarking and news services, and are eager for updates from their favorite YouTube directors a real reason to give the browser a try.
The Flock 1.0 beta is still built on Firefox, and it looks sharp--the layout is easy to understand, and although the sheer number of buttons and options take a moment to get used to, you get the feeling that all of your services are at your fingertips.
Flock's shines when you log into those sites and services, so if you open the sidebar you can select the blogging platforms that you use (Blogger, Livejournal, Wordpress, etc), the media services you subscribe to (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc), and log into them all at once. When you're logged in, Flock will customize all of the views to your accounts with those services. For example, when you log into YouTube and Flickr, Flock can update your media toolbar to include photostreams from your friends.
Flock can do this with a number of your services and blogs, and can even support self-hosted blogs if they're using supported software (like Wordpress, for example). Flock has a built-in RSS reader and blog editor, so you can keep up with your favorite blogs and update your own. Flock will even customize a start page for you with your popular feeds and sites.
Flock makes it incredibly easy to stay on top of all of your blogs, your social bookmarking sites, and favorite media services. Since all of it's built into the browser, you don't need extensions and add-ons like you would with Firefox or Internet Explorer. Even though so much function is built into Flock, it doesn't seem to slow the browser down much or increase it's memory footprint significantly.
Whether or not people will flock to Flock (pun intended) remains to be seen however; for all of the functionality in the app, most people likely only use a handful of the supported services. At the same time, if an hour doesn't go by without you checking your RSS feeds, adding to your del.icio.us bookmarks, uploading photos to your Photobucket account, or updating your Typepad blog, Flock might be for you.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment