I thought I might as well have a go and try out Flock, the new browser that integrates social software – so rather than having bookmarks, it hooks up directly to my del.icio.us account, and rather than having a “blog this” bookmarklet on the toolbar, there’s an icon of a pen that lets me blog through the browser, even offering to set me up a blog if I don’t already have one. If this publishes, I guess that worked.

So far (after about two and a half minutes) it seems pretty cool. I’ve seen lots of criticism of doing this as a whole new browser (a “fork” of the Mozilla code) rather than continuing to work within the mainstream of Mozilla development, doing this as extensions or something.

I like the idea of “The Shelf”: “a scrapbook for interesting web content that you want to blog about later.” And apparently it’ll track pages I visit often, so that when I’ve been using the browser for a few days I’ll be able to quickly look at my actual favourites rather than what I think are my favourites. That might be interesting….

Oh, and despite the many warnings about how this release of Flock is developers only and full of potential bugs, it was super-easy to install and so far works glitchlessly.

So lets see how it goes.

3 thoughts on “Testing Flock

  1. kawazu

    Just for the minutes: ScrapBook used to be an addon fo Firefox/Mozilla which has been around for quite some time, and I’m using it rather extensively even now having a fast internet access – sometimes it’s good having some content archived in a “safe place”. 🙂 The Blog Editor is cool, but overally I’d rather use different single tools for all these tasks (for example, by now I haven’t found any rss/feed readers better than liferea or thunderbird :)).

  2. Jason

    Not as much of a criticism as a “Sheesh, not another browser to develop for”. The features they’ve added to the browser are great but it sure would be nice to not have to do the base install, THEN go get all the extensions to make it work the way you want. It’s a total catch 22; I just hope this new kid on the block doesn’t hurt the already slowing down the Firefox adoption. It would be nice to have a semi-equal market share for IE and Firefox, for standards sake.

    It sure is nice that it uses del.icio.us for bookmarks natively though…

  3. Daryl

    Hi, Jill. Thanks for giving Flock a chance and for the thoughtful blog post. We’re definitely taking some heat for doing a browser rather than as an extension. We actually started out writing an extension but figured out after spending a fair amount of time going down that path that we couldn’t provide as good an end-to-end user experience in an extension. And here we are today. Thanks again for the download and the write-up. I hope you’ll stay tuned.

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