I just downloaded the beta of Flock and playing around with the new browser and all it’s nifty little features. It is actually kind of cool. It’s essentially FireFox with a little beef added to it. The UI is very slick and much nicer than FireFox. It also has integration with Flickr, photo bucket, del.icio.us, blogger, live journal, and other online services to name a few. I can upload pictures, put them into blogs or emails share my favorites lists, and put favorites into delicious. All this with little to no extra effort, without ever visiting a website and without using up my link bar on silly text links that take up lots of space. They don’t seem to have integrated support for frappr or kaboodle yet which would be lovely additions, but maybe those will come down the pipe. Oh they also have support for technorati which makes adding the blog and tagging it easy as pie and you will likely see my blogs now have technorati tags attached to them.
I like the browser, however I don’t think there is enough here for the average user to make the switch. If you are a serious blogger or use flickr way too much for a healthy individual you will need this browser. I can’t help but wonder who they will raw in others though. Most people don’t care about these types of features… though I do think they add something to the Internet to make it more useful… it just isn’t enough for other people to join in. This browser in every other way seems identical to Firefox and I am just not sure if that is going to be enough to get people to make a change. They will have to do more to make every day Internet life easier without images and blogs. My only idea on this would be an integrated email client so you wouldn’t need a second program for this or built in support for gmail or something (my guess would be yahoo as they seem to be partnering with yahoo quite profusely). Having these as separate programs is not needed in this day and age and I think a merger is long overdue and may give flock the kind of additional push it needs.
technorati tags:flock, browser, flickr, blogs, new, firefox
Blogged with Flock