Revisiting Flock

A few posts back, I mentioned the Flock browser in passing. At the time, I hadn't really played with it much since I use Firefox almost exclusively. This past weekend, I decided to load up Flock and give it a whirl.

Of all the non-IE browsers out there, Flock is the only one I've seen that is positioning itself as something completely different. It incorporates all the cool browser features the other non-IE browsers innovated, such as tabbed browsing, toolbars that hold the web icons known as "favicons", and the ability to import both favicons and bookmarks from other programs.

What Flock does differently is to build in tools that make using popular social networking sites easy to access. For example, you can open a sidebar on the browser, sign into Facebook, and all your friends will show up there, with their most current comments or status updates. Much easier to monitor than constantly visiting Facebook and reading your news feed.

If you blog, you can set Flock up with all of your blog sites and passwords. In fact, it will import most of the information once you sign into your blog page. With one click on the toolbar, a blog post editing box opens. You can drag images directly into the box from the web or your own computer. When you are done, click "Publish", choose the correct blog from the menu, and you're done.

If you use webmail, such as Gmail, AOL Mail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc, Flock will let you set up all of your accounts, and by clicking the webmail icon on the toolbar, provide a status of all your webmail accounts in the sidebar (new mail, unread mail, etc). You can do the same for RSS feeds you might subscribe to.

Along the top of the browser, you can activate a media bar. When you come to web site with media, Flock will load the media into the bar in thumbnail sized icons, where you can preview them without leaving the web page. The media bar is also set up to search all of the popular media sharing sites; You Tube, Flickr, and others. You can bookmark your favorites, or preview from a media search without leaving the web page you are currently browsing.

This browser is a tad "busy", and can overwhelm you with all of the various features. You definitely need to put a little time into learning your way around. But if you are a person who is engaged in multiple social networking and sharing sites, if you maintain multiple webmail accounts, or if you often upload blog posts, Facebook status updates, and pictures/video on a regular basis, I can't see why you wouldn't want to try Flock out. I think it will streamline your multi-tasking tremendously.

Blogged with the Flock Browser