Social Media is great. There are tons of web sites for you to share every aspect of your life in every possible way. However, it can be a bit confusing to keep up with all those web sites. If you spend too much time on one, will you be neglecting the others? Sure there are plug-ins for FireFox and some for IE, but what if your browser itself actually catered to all your social networking needs? Enter the Flock web browser.
Flock is a fairly new browser to the market. Though it’s young, Flock has already received some rave reviews with awards from SXSW, CNet and The Webby Awards.
It’s just another browser right? Wrong. Instead of using plug-ins or addons for connecting with your social networks, they’re integrated into the flow of using the Internet.
Right away you’ll notice some buttons below the typical navigation area. Clicking a button in this area will bring up a side bar to scratch your social itch. Want to know what all your friends are up to? Click the “People” button and you’ll see status updates from all your friends on Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Pownce, YouTube and a many others. You can change your status right from the side bar too!
It doesn’t just stop at status though. Say one of your friends posted some photos (or video). The “Media” link next to their profile pic will be highlighted. Click that and the photos will load in a media bar directly above the web page you have open. That’s pretty slick! Oh, and see a photo in that media bar that you want to share with another friend? Click and drag that photo to any profile box in the side bar and done… shared!
That’s not all Flock offers either. They have a web mail notify tool and one-click link to your email, an RSS reader built in, Favorites, Web clipboard, photo uploader (that will resize and rename photos on the fly), you can even write and publish to your blog all from the browser interface.
Maybe you’re thinking at this point, “Sounds pretty good, but I’m a FireFox user and I can’t live without my FireFox addons.” Well, if that’s you then you’re in for a treat. Since Flock is written with the Mozilla engine, most of the addons for FireFox will work perfectly in the Flock browser.
Flock is the first browser to take the social network arena and fully integrate it into the UI. There are some things I think it could do better (support for a few more sites) and some things that I’m still loyal to “the brand” for (I don’t think I’ll be leaving Google Reader any time soon, sorry), but I’ve been using Flock for about 6 weeks now and already it’s become a favorite over FireFox and definitely Internet Explorer.
With IE8 on the horizon and FireFox3 just being released, it will be interesting to see what affect Flock will have on the browser wars. Social media isn’t going away anytime soon, so the big dogs might take a peek over their shoulder or they could get left in the dust.
Head over here to download Flock and try it for yourself, then post a comment and tell me what you think.
