Flock. Get ready to meet your new favorite browser!
Want a browser that is stable, functional, and incredibly useful? I think we all do. I have been using Camino for some time due to how fast it is but I have been using Firefox more and more due to me needing to do a lot more debugging and diagnosing of Web sites. The most recent versions have let me down a bit due to the betas being much crashier then I am accustomed to by Firefox.
Of course this isn’t a post bashing Firefox, this is a post proclaiming how incredibly cool Flock is.
Flock is a browser based on Firefox. You can install almost all of your favorite plugins and add-ons from the Firefox Web site as you normally would, as well as addons from the Flock site. The standout feature of Flock is the tight integration with all of your favorite social Web sites. Now you ask, why would I want my browser to be integrated with Facebook? So I can get Poked or Sold in my browser instead of the site? Nope, the integration is quite clever actually.
Once you go to one of your favorite social Web sites such as Flickr and sign in, you will see your friends in a sidebar in the left. this will allow you to see when they update their info, or change things. You can make updates to your status right from your browser, as well as make Twitter posts. When a buddy adds a new photo to his Flickr, you will be notified unobtrusively that he or she has made a change. Have you ever wanted to post a photo to somebody’s MySpace but had no idea what the pesky code was to add it? No longer a problem. You can open up your media window in Flock, and drag and drop a photo from any of your friends or your Flickr account right into the MySpace comment. No fancy HTML knowledge needed. These are only some of the features.
Very very cool.
The nicest thing is it is very subtle. It is basically a Firefox browser with a few extras buttons. When features are available to you, the browser will tell you.
I understand it all seems a bit silly. I had no idea why I would want all this integration. The thing is, once I installed it and small new features popping up, it started to dawn on me how nice these little feature are and how time saving it is. Instead of surfing to 5-10 different sites a day to digest everybody’s changes overnight, I can see most of them from a custom homepage. If I do a lot of searching on one Web site, Flock will ask me if I want to add that search to the browser so I can do it faster next time. If I want to tell everybody I am eating a peanut butter and asparagus sandwich on Twitter I can do it in a few seconds without going to the site or picking up my phone. You can even blog directly from it to your favorit platforms like Blogger, Typepad, or Wordpress.
I am probably explaining how cool this browser is poorly. All I can say is give it a try. It will not overwrite any of your existing browsers and it will even import all your info from your old ones.
Good stuff.
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Tags: technology, tools of the trade, useful tips
