Flock’s New Beta Rocks

I tried Flock in it’s early public beta stage and didn’t think much about it. I’m here to retract that statement and shout out for anyone who blogs, uses Flickr, uses a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or even just cuts and pastes things from the Web to use or refer to later to give it a try.

Flock is a browser built on a Mozilla platform that incorporates community features into the browser experience itself. Before I decided to give it another try I listened to the podcast on Talkcrunch with Mike Arrington and was so impressed with how they described the community functionality that I decided it was worth one more download.

Flickr Integration

I’ve mentioned before what a Flickr addict I’ve become. One of the reasons for that addiction is the ease with which I can view comments made to my photos, comment on others’ photos, participate in the larger Flickr communities, and of course, the gratification that comes with that is the main reason. Flock’s Flickr integration is awesome.

There is a topbar where you can display your own photos, new photos from your contacts, or all new photos coming into Flickr. The slickest part is the uploading and blogging functionality. Uploading is as simple as clicking the Upload button, dragging and dropping your photos, tagging and titling, and they’re done. There’s also some “Album” functionality (which I think actually translates to Flickr Sets) so that photos can be grouped.

Blogging a photo is as easy as dragging and dropping it from the topbar into a blog post, another very cool and intuitive feature.

Built-in Feed Reader

UPDATE I’m holding this part in abeyance until they fix some glitches in the feed reading part. It’s easy enough to add feeds, but hard to get them to load for reading. I suspect the servers they’re using to pull the RSS feeds in are overwhelmed or something. Anyway, if it actually worked quickly I’d keep this part in, but for now, Bloglines prevails.

Another really nice feature is the built-in feed reader. I am a hard-core Bloglines subscriber and it would take a lot to drag me away from there, but Flock has done it.

Here’s a screenshot of the feed reader, with all feeds listed in the sidebar and the text in the main window. It doesn’t show in this screenshot, but when feeds are unread, they’re bolded. The only thing I’d like to see (and it may do this but I’ve not found the settings yet), is to show only new feeds as they come through, rather than the whole list, similar to Bloglines’ “Show New Feeds”.

Subscribing to feeds is as easy as right-clicking a page with a feed icon on it and adding it. It’s intuitive and easy.

Blogging

Flock supports all of the main blogging platforms so that you can blog straight from your browser at the page you want to blog on. Setting up a blog is as simple as going to your blog editor page and logging in. Flock will tell you that it can set up your blog for blogging from any page you’ve loaded into your browser, and if you say “yes”, it prompts for login information and you’re all set. The cool part is that if you have more than one blog, it will store and set up all of your blogs to make it easy to post. All you do is select your blog before posting.

Some other nice features: Saving blog posts directly to your disk in case they get lost in the publishing stream, easy toggling between the WYSIWYG editor and HTML source, and spell check.

Clipping

If you’ve ever had to cut and paste something from one page to another you’ll appreciate the Clipping feature. Just select the text, photos or other content you want to copy, and either right-click or click the little clipboard icon on the lower left, and your selection will be saved by Flock for you to use whenever you need it.

All in all, the developers of Flock have really taken the time to listen to what today’s Internet users want in a browser. Much of the functionality of Flock can be added into Firefox with Greasemonkey scripts or extensions, but the cool thing about Flock is that they’ve made it easy for people who are not geeks and don’t want to hunt down those extensions.

Flock gets five stars from me for putting the users first. (UPDATE: 6/28 — But, they need to fix the issues with the feeds in order for me to fully endorse and recommend it, which I’d like to do)

technorati tags:flock, internet, flickr, browser, blogging, blog, web2.0, bloglines

Blogged with Flock

Tagged as: Internet, Reviews, Technology