Trying out Flock

Posted: June 18th, 2008 | Author: Steve | Filed under: Technology | Tags: blog, blogging, firefox, flock, internet, socialmedia, Technology, web browser | View Comments

I’m a huge fan of the blog Lifehacker, and have discovered a lot of web and productivity tools by reading it. yesterday’s article on the Firefox-based web browser Flock, Flock 1.2 Bakes Social Networking into Everyday Browsing, led me to give Flock a try. At first, I was skeptical about adding another web browser to the mix, but, after trying it out, it seems like a godsend for bloggers and social media addicts.

Flock is basically Firefox, but with a bunch of social-networking and blogging integration built right in. It includes tools to integrate Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Flickr, Gmail, YouTube, Picasa, Blogger, WordPress del.icio.us, along with a several others. It’s a little busy, with buttons and sidebars for almost everything, but once you get used to it you realize that everything is organized very well. It’s sort of like a dashboard for social media. If you are someone who likes to work with multiple browser windows open, then this might work well for you, because it keeps a lot of stuff condensed into one place. I usually have one browser window that has Gmail and Google reader tabbed in it, and I will probably use Flock for that now, while still using Firefox for everything else.

Let’s take a look at some of the interesting features for bloggers:

• Blog Editor: Flock has a built-in blog editor, that can hook in to most blog software, including self-hosted blogs. It works both online and off line, which means that you don’t have to be connected to the web to edit your posts. Flock’s editor has all the basics, similar to most text editors, and includes html editing, linking and media embedding.

  Where this editor really shines is in it’s ability to automatically embed media, such as photos and video, simply by dragging them from the browser window into the post you are editing. It’s that simple. From my experience with the WordPress.com blog editor, video embedding is particularly difficult, so this alone will make my life much easier.

• Media Support: To go along with the blog editor, Flock allows you easy access to your photo and video streams. Once you set up your Flickr, YouTube or other media accounts, you are able to view streams in a “filmstrip” that appears above the web page in your browser tab. From there, you can easily drag and drop stuff into blog posts. Flock also has buttons which allow you to email photos and videos directly from the filmstrip, and this goes directly to your Gmail account if you have one.What’s really neat here is that you can also subscribe to other people’s media streams, and view them in the filmstrip. This means that pictures posted anywhere from Facebook to Flickr are only a few clicks away.
• Photo Uploader: Flock includes a photo uploader, which can load up to 1,000 photos at a time, to any of your sign-up services. Once again, you can do all of this without having to leave the comfort of your browser.
• Digg: Having access to Digg, especially to submit new posts, is another time saver. Flickr also allows you to view a stream of your submitted posts in the filmstrip, and you can see how many diggs each has.
• del.icio.us: delicio.us integration sounded, at first, like the perfect thing to have, but I’m not completely happy with the way it was implemented. Clicking the favorites button allows you to add web pages to both your favorites and to your del.icio.us account. The problem is that you have to go into the sidebar separately to add tags, which is a huge disadvantage.  I still like the del.icio.us bookmarks Firefox extension better. The extension allows you to tag immediately and has many more features, including being able to turn favorite tags into toolbars, a feature I use quite a bit. I’m sticking with the extension for now.

All in all, Flock seems to be a great browser.  I’m probably going to continue to use it for my main blog editor and social media browser, while using Firefox to do the regular browsing.