I’ve written about Flock before, but problems with some of the more recent beta versions kept me firmly in Firefox and away from Flock.  Until recently.  Starting with version .8 or so, they’ve made some real steps forward.  I’m writing this using 1.0 Beta which is currently by invitation only and I’m astounded at the huge differences between .9 and 1.0!

Here are some major differences:

1. Facebook Integration - Facebook is seamlessly built into the Flock browser. When I installed it, it looked for my settings and imported them directly into my profile. I logged into Facebook and Flock automatically set it up for me. Easy as that.
2. Twitter integration - Viewing tweets is as simple as popping open the Twitter sidebar. If only posting them were as simple. You still have to load up the page to post a tweet from your browser - I’d like to see the Twitter features live in a sidebar, similar to the Twitbin extension for Firefox.
3. Sidebar access to all accounts and services - This is HUGE for me, because I have several Wordpress blogs that I handle posting to (volunteer non-profit stuff) and then I have a bunch of Blogger blogs that I work on for work, and then my own Wordpress blogs, plus Flickr accounts, plus Zooomr account, plus Facebook, Twitter, etc….you get the picture. Lots of accounts to keep track of, but when Flock does it for me, it saves me a ton of time and brain space (no more remembering which login goes where)…
4. Drag and Drop Photo Uploads - Currently this works for Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket and Piczo. It’s a super feature — makes using images really easy.

With every point release, the Flock developers make it a little bit faster and a whole lot better. This one is no exception, except that the difference between .9 and 1.0 is HUGE — It has a sleeker, less heavy look and feel while jam-packing all of the major social networking features into one. I’m still test-driving, but so far I’ve not found much to criticize.

On my wish list for future releases: Zooomr and Pownce integration, and the ability to update Twitter in the sidebar. And thank you, Flock developers, for toning down the automatic Yahoo! defaults. There was a time where I thought Flock was really the default Yahoo! browser, but this time around it seems to play nice with Google Reader, GMail and it keeps my default search as Google instead of reverting back to Yahoo!

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Flock, browser, social web, internet, web2.0, reviews