Filed under: Cool tools, Blogging, Internet, Internet Tools, Reviews
Sneak Peek: Flock, a new kind of browser
There's been quite a bit of buzz floating around about a new browser coming to the party by the name of Flock. For a while now, their site has stated their browser is going to change the way we work with the web, and from playing around with the developer preview they released yesterday, I don't think they were kidding.
Flock is actually built on the Firefox core, but aside from a familiar menu structure I think the similarities end there. Exhibiting their mantra of building a better tool for the web, Flock has social bookmarking, blogging and even Flickr tools built right in. The first time you star (bookmark) a site, Flock asks if you’d like to enter your del.icio.us account information, in which case it will integrate with your del.icio.us bookmarks for any sites you star and tag from here on out. A great idea that, in my opinion, just about every browser should’ve done the day del.icio.us debuted. Keep reading after the bump, as this browser has some more great tricks up its sleeve.
Flock is actually built on the Firefox core, but aside from a familiar menu structure I think the similarities end there. Exhibiting their mantra of building a better tool for the web, Flock has social bookmarking, blogging and even Flickr tools built right in. The first time you star (bookmark) a site, Flock asks if you’d like to enter your del.icio.us account information, in which case it will integrate with your del.icio.us bookmarks for any sites you star and tag from here on out. A great idea that, in my opinion, just about every browser should’ve done the day del.icio.us debuted. Keep reading after the bump, as this browser has some more great tricks up its sleeve.
Next up is Flickr integration.
Enabling a Flickr toolbar gives you the option of entering a Flickr user name to browse that user’s images, right from inside the browser, while still being able to surf. This toolbar is handy, and will become even more useful with one of Flock’s most appealing features: blogging.
Flock offers some powerful and appealing features for blogging. Right now Flock can post to Blogger and I believe *most* systems that use either the MetaWeblog, Moveable Type or Atom API’s. Setup is a breeze, and once you’re finished you can now right click just about anything in the browser and chose a “Blog This” option, which opens a post window. Images can be dragged and dropped into the post, and there’s even a great set of features to customize how the image is presented. A blog toolbar can be enabled which gives access and edit ability of all your previous posts, even those not written with Flock. What’s even better: in the blog post window you can turn on the Flickr toolbar, and any of the images you find in there are drag and droppable onto the blog post. Just like adding bookmarks to del.icio.us, you can also tag your posts. Very slick and easy to use.
A lot of the Firefox functionality like reading RSS feeds, themes and extensions are all present. While you can’t use actual Firefox extensions or themes, they have a small selection of their own. After poking around with most of Flock’s big features though, I have to say: I’m pretty excited, though I'll admit not everyone is as hip on a new browser as me. If you grab a copy keep in mind that it’s a developer preview right now, so it’s going to act funny at times and quite probably crash on you once or twice. But if you’re looking for a fresh new perspective on using and participating in the web, I highly suggest you go whet your apetite with Flock's offering.
Enabling a Flickr toolbar gives you the option of entering a Flickr user name to browse that user’s images, right from inside the browser, while still being able to surf. This toolbar is handy, and will become even more useful with one of Flock’s most appealing features: blogging.
Flock offers some powerful and appealing features for blogging. Right now Flock can post to Blogger and I believe *most* systems that use either the MetaWeblog, Moveable Type or Atom API’s. Setup is a breeze, and once you’re finished you can now right click just about anything in the browser and chose a “Blog This” option, which opens a post window. Images can be dragged and dropped into the post, and there’s even a great set of features to customize how the image is presented. A blog toolbar can be enabled which gives access and edit ability of all your previous posts, even those not written with Flock. What’s even better: in the blog post window you can turn on the Flickr toolbar, and any of the images you find in there are drag and droppable onto the blog post. Just like adding bookmarks to del.icio.us, you can also tag your posts. Very slick and easy to use.
A lot of the Firefox functionality like reading RSS feeds, themes and extensions are all present. While you can’t use actual Firefox extensions or themes, they have a small selection of their own. After poking around with most of Flock’s big features though, I have to say: I’m pretty excited, though I'll admit not everyone is as hip on a new browser as me. If you grab a copy keep in mind that it’s a developer preview right now, so it’s going to act funny at times and quite probably crash on you once or twice. But if you’re looking for a fresh new perspective on using and participating in the web, I highly suggest you go whet your apetite with Flock's offering.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
arkowi said 1:08PM on 10-21-2005
Funny, I just started playing with Flock this morning. I like it so far.
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Mark said 1:16PM on 10-21-2005
I really like the visual style of flock, but i can honestly say that i've never used del.ico.us or flickr :(
i guess i'm just not as 'hip' as everyone else... i'm still stuck in the Deviantart.com days.
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Kyle Brown said 1:35PM on 10-21-2005
I think the flickr integration alone is worth me trying it out. I actually just started liking Shiira after Laurie suggested it a while back, but Flock looks cooler and more polished already.
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norebonomis said 1:37PM on 10-21-2005
flock is wicked awsome, allthough i will uninstall it until a more stable release! haha, crashed about six times on me while trying to use it's blogging feature.
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Thomas said 1:38PM on 10-21-2005
I've been using Flock for more than a week and it's quite nice. The theme makes a big difference itself! However as it progresses, it'll have a lot of cool features that other browsers haven't thought of yet. Social web browsing starts now!
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gaylord johnson said 1:41PM on 10-21-2005
flock is great, i've been using it all morning even though i have never flickr'd, del.icio.us'd or blog'd in my life, i can appreciate a great thing... and this is it.
the only thing i hate at the moment, is that when you first start it up, you can import all of your bookmarks from other browsers, other browsers except for firefox! WTF! i deleted IE a long time ago. so now i need to input all of my bookmarks again.
hey flockers, fix this, and you got yourself a users!
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gaylord johnson said 1:43PM on 10-21-2005
flock is great, i've been using it all morning even though i have never flickr'd, del.icio.us'd or blog'd in my life, i can appreciate a great thing... and this is it.
the only thing i hate at the moment, is that when you first start it up, you can import all of your bookmarks from other browsers, other browsers except for firefox! WTF! i deleted IE a long time ago. so now i need to input all of my bookmarks again.
hey flockers, fix this, and you got yourself a users!
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NetworkShadow said 3:03PM on 10-21-2005
I like it. I just got my hands on the preview version yesterday. It's still a bit un-polished in a few places, but could be the next killer app browser.
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matth said 3:22PM on 10-21-2005
its flockin great.
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bagel said 3:33PM on 10-21-2005
I just wished that bookmarks were more easily available. Right now, you need to go to del.icio.us to access your personal bookmarks. If they had a del.icio.us dropdown menu that listed your bookmarks filed under their del.icio.us tags I would like it. The intermediary step of going online for my bookmarks is annoying.
Or maybe I haven't found the right feature yet in my preliminary explorations of Flock?
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shidoshi said 4:10PM on 10-21-2005
In Flock's toolbar, there is a button with three stars. Click on there. Voila - there are your favorites.
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Radu Dutzan said 4:53PM on 10-22-2005
Tried to post a comment about this, but Flock crashed when I did. Flock it.
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Michael Clark said 3:18PM on 10-24-2005
I think it is great but as for the blogging portion I did not see a way to access my categories. So my posts just went up as uncategorized, maybe I am missing something. The drag and drop functionality from flickr is awesome.
To all those that have not tried out flickr do it not so you can be flockin flickring.
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David Chartier said 3:15PM on 11-02-2005
gaylord johnson: there are delicious extensions for Firefox. Why not grab one of those and get your marks from Firefox into del.icio.us. Then Flock ought to pick them up the next time you start it up, as I believe it checks delicious at least on each startup.
It'd be great to hear if this works!
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