Have you joined the Flock yet?
Most of you are probably aware of Flock, the social networking browser.
I first read about Flock in a PC magazine a few years ago, and didn't really comprehend what the whole thing was about. The words web 2.0 came up, as did visionary and I really had no idea what it meant. Web 2.0 was meaningless to me (in fact it is still debatably meaningless)
This was back in the days when Facebook was a college students only site and I really wasn't much into the whole social networking thing. In fact it still doesn't really appeal to me, sure I have a lot of accounts in various services but most of them I only use on the odd occasion.
I actually think this is where most people get the wrong idea about Flock. It's marketed as the "social-network addicts" browser and understandably that's not how many of you would wish to label yourself.
However you don't have to be this sort of person in order for Flock to be an incredibly useful browser for you. Flock in fact has literally hundreds of features and integrated services which will make life a whole lot easier for you.
Your first reaction to this may be that any of this functionality could be simply added into Firefox with extensions, and that's perfectly true. The reason I prefer Flock however is because everything is built in, optimised, secure and safe... it's a lot faster then a Firefox browser the same features added in. You can actually still add any extensions into Flock because it's built upon Firefox, it's not recommended but it should work.
I won't go into detail on every feature offered in Flock, but I will say that now is as good a time as any to give it a whirl. Seriously, try it out for a day or two... you may as well..
Flock beta 1.2 is here and it introduced AOL mail, Digg and Pownce integration.
If you're a blogger Flock has a killer feature for you... Web Clipboard Sidebar... drag anything from a webpage onto it and it'll stick around for later. It's incredibly helpful for research and grabbing random scraps from round the net for an article later.
Hope you get converted too...
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I use only LiveJournal on regular basis, so I don’t need any special browser, I think.
Nice article – just downloaded Flock earlier today then came across his article. You pointed out a feature I didn’t know about – the web clipboard.
Thanks for that as it will come in useful when I’m compiling sources for a blog post etc.
Flock will go to ff3 when it becomes stable and almost all firefox addons work with it but I don’t use it because it’s basically firefox for social networking not web 2.0
Once again, Martin you gave me what I was looking for and I didn’t even know I needed it.
This is the reason why I remain a devoted and ardent follower of your site!
You’re the man!
aol integration? you know anyone still using aol?
flock is a great browser. very nice built-in rss reader. right now it’s built on ff2. when they make the move to ff3 it will very likely become my primary browser.
G’day Martin, way to go! I had exactly the same thoughts about Flock i.e. “couldn’t it be integrated into FF…but wait, there’s some killer features”. Now I’m loving Flock.
Cheers, Thomas