For a while now, I’ve been hearing about Flock, the so called “social browser.” After playing around with it for a few hours, I’m not quite sure I agree with that designation. However, it is a cool piece of software, and if we want to see where the next generation of browsers is going, than Flock just might be leading the way.

Rather than reinventing the wheel here, Flock stands on the shoulders of an established browser- Firefox. While it doesn’t get based on the brand new Firefox 2.0, it does use the robust and stable 1.5.0.9 version. During testing, the flock browser did not crash once, which is excellent. Being based on Firefox means that users of the popular open source browser will feel right at home, as the toolbar is laid out in a familiar buttons, address bar and search sequence (I’m constantly annoyed that Internet Explorer 7 changed things around a little bit). The buttons are done in a pleasing light blue interface. One criticism, that also can be leveled at Firefox is that the “new tab” button has to be added by going to “view”–>”toolbars”–>”customize”–> and then dragging it onto the toolbar. As this is such a useful button, it really should be installed by default.

Flock handles RSS feeds just like Firefox. Just clicking on the orange feed icon on the right of the address bar when the site provides a feed signs you up. This is well done, and makes it easy to keep up with your favorite sites, however this is nothing more than Firefox offers in the end.

The handling of images is where Flock starts to differentiate itself. The browser gets linked to one of two popular photo sharing services: Flickr and Photobucket via the user’s account. I chose to use Photobucket, and the setup was simple. Basically, Flock stores the username and password so it can access it directly. Unfortunately, for users of any other service (I still need to review Fotki…), well, you’re simply out of luck for now. Once things are set up, then they get interesting. When you have an image to save, like from a web page, or a relative’s photo site, then we just have to launch the photo uploader, designate the image, and it goes into the online account. After that, a toolbar appears at the top of the Flock browser. We can designate it to have only our photos, add in friend’s photos, or have the whole Photobucket of images. As digital photography is everywhere, and tons of images get posted constantly, this really streamlines organizing photos. While I was impressed with this feature, the next one was even better.

Flickr claimed that it could even interface and publish to a blog. It claims to work with several popular interfaces, including the two that are near and dear to my heart- Blogger, and Wordpress.

After setting up Flock so I could access my blogging account, the rest is brain dead simple. From within the browser interface, I simply highlight the text and/or images to be blogged. I then just right click with the mouse and select “blog this.” The screen above then appears. Notice that while the post is untitled, I can easily fill that in. The highlighted text is designated as a quote, and the source page is linked. This is quite auotomated, and faster than opening doing this manually. Unfortunately, if I selected both text and an image, only the image gets posted so clearly there is a glitch here. While I wouldn’t create TechNudge like this, for a more personal notebook style blog that was based on clipped content, Flock provides a powerful and easy to use tool.

Speaking of clipping content for later, Flock also will interface directly with Del.icio.us and Shadows (which I have never heard of before). Simply holding down the star button to the left of the address bar allows me to add a website address to my Del.icio.us accout. This is great for keeping track of sites and articles in places not frequently visited. For example, if researching a product purchase, I can keep a six reviews I found in my Del.icio.us account so I don’t have to keep finding them again.

In summary, I think Flock has three key features that allow it to integrate better into a total web browsing and internet experience. While not fully polished, by working with images, blogs, and bookmark sites, it represents the next step in the evolution of internet browsing. I think that at least some of these features, particularly the image handling, will find their way into future versions of more mainstream browsers. In the meantime, we can get a glimpse into the not too distant future, today.

–Jonas

Download Flock here.