control, shift, cheeseburger

Flock, a browser designed on the Mozilla engine that powers Firefox and many others, like the Mac only Camino, is probably the only tool you will ever need if you are into social networking. It is designed around blogging and new media per se, with hooks to Weblogs like Wordpress, Movable Type, TypePad, and LiveJournal. Media sites like YouTube, Flickr and PhotoBucket. Social aggregators like Del.icio,us, and Facebook, and Webmail such as Yahoo and GMail.

The beta version I have on the Mac is very stable. I have only had a couple of situations where it went down and that might have been from impatience. Performance wise, Flock is just as fast a browser as Firefox, but neither of them is as fast as Safari or OmniWeb. It is in the features where it can really be a benefit. Flock has a media sidebar, where all of the accounts you use are located. You can login and out right from there. In the small tool bar at the top of the sidebar, you have access to a lot of built-in features. Lets follow them from left to right.

1. My World: An aggregator for all the things in your browser. Better than some Web Portals, it can actually show things that are pertinent to you at the time, for example, if a friend of yours put up some pics at Flickr, or added a Twitter post, etc.
2. Media Bar: Opens a media bar at the top of your browser window. From there, you can look at the featured streams or your favorites from YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, Truveo, etc. Clicking on one will open it in the main browser window. There is also a dedicated search field for all of these services.
3. Feeds Sidebar: Brings up a news aggregator which allows you to subscribe to your favorite RSS feeds. You can also have it open your preferred application for news reading. To test, I exported my NetNewsWire feeds to an OPML file and imported them into Flock. It took a few minutes, but it worked. You click on the feed you want to read and it opens in the browser. Of course, Flock gives you the opportunity to read, email, save or blog an article. Clicking the back button takes you back to the feeds home page. Any new feeds are shown in My World. This is good if you want to do everything you need to do right from Flock, the only drawback is that there are no hooks to NewsGator, the online aggregator that keeps NetNewsWire synced across different computers.
4. Inbox: Hooks into your Webmail accounts, and brings up your top 10 unread messages. It will allow you access messages for reading or will open the compose screen in the browser. In my informal testing, however, it seems a bit slow on loading GMail. I haven’t yet tested it with Yahoo! Mail.
5. Favorite Sites: Opens your favorites on top and your Del.icio.us online faves on the bottom. Pretty straightforward.
6. Accounts & Services: Allows you to look at all of your accounts, login, log out, add new ones and forget others.
7. Web Clipboard: Cool. Allows you to drag and drop text, pictures and media from the browser or Media Bar onto it and then act on it. You can view it, email it, blog it or delete it.
8. Blog Editor: What I’m doing right now. You can blog from anywhere in the browser and it will come up with the page or thing you are blogging about. You can drop stuff directly from the Web Clipboard onto the blog editor. Pics are live and resizable, YouTube vids embed, and plain, untagged text goes where you put it. There is support for Technorati tags as well. It’s a pretty basic editor, but good.
9. Photo Uploader: Lets you drag and drop photos directly from your computer onto it so you can upload it to your favorite picture service.

Of course this is a beta so here are some things I hope get addressed.

• There is a definite performance issue at least on my G5 iMac and my Intel iMac at work. The program seems to take a lot of memory and it polls the ‘Net a lot attempting to update its content.
• Since this is all about the social networking, like a dedicated blog editor, when you do blog something, you should be able to send email notifications, Tweets, Facebook messages, etc. to your inner circle without any special tools.
• The search is great, and is a feature I didn’t touch on yet. It not only allows you to search all the major engines, it also lets you look on Craigslist, Amazon, ebay, etc. It is geared toward Yahoo! which, as I have said in the past, is not my preferred method of searching, however, you can change that. It should be SE agnostic.
• You should be able to post to online forums like phpBB, etc. BBCode support should be built in.
• It should have podcast tools built in.

OK, now the big question. Since Firefox has excellent plug-in support, how is it for Flock? Pretty good. There is some disparity; for example, I tried the Colorful Tabs and Separe plug-ins at work, and it wasn’t good in Flock. I use those to distinguish between tabs opened from various domains and to separate tabs into groups. Flock tabs are different than Firefox tabs and it utilizes the Internet Explorer paradigm; Flock has a new tab button on the tab bar. I can only tell you about plug-ins I use, and for the most part, the ones I used that didn’t deal with tabs worked fine.

The other question; since Firefox has such a robust plug-in architecture, why use Flock at all? Can’t most of its functionality be duplicated by plug-ins without the need for a new browser? That’s a call we all have to make individually. Some plug-ins integrate better than others. Flock gives you good bang for the buck (free) out of the box without having to try a bunch of things out. Also, you can use most Firefox plug-ins, so you should try the ones you like and see if they work for you. Then, you don’t have use the built-in tools you don’t like.

Bottom line; this is a worthy upgrade to a tool that didn’t quite have it all going on. Except for the performance issues I mentioned, which should be ironed out in the final release, this is useful and gives you the ability to monitor all of your social networking from one basket.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: blogging, Flock, Mozilla, browser, Mac, Camino, Safari, OmniWeb

Filed under: Internet, Products, Software, Tech