Flock 1.0 social browser soon
Flock 1.0, which enables you to share photos and bookmarks with friends, will be out soon.
What is the big deal about another browser?
Well, Web 2.0 services are that big deal. The people at Flock seem to think that a browser that enables better social networking is the flavour of the day, and they have created their browser on stop of the Mozilla Firefox to enable surfers to share their images and bookmarks easily.
For those who are not seriously into Web 2.0, this would sound pretty much superflous. After all, there are sites where you can do all this without a special Flock 1.0 browser. Instant messengers enable chatting, surf-together options, sending of pictures, mail, whiteboard and whatnot. What does Flock aim to achieve when it ocmes out of beta with the first 1.0 version?
Let us take a detailed look. First of all, lesser viruses and security threats. Flock is built on top of Firefox, after all.
Then, it has a photo toolbar which will display photos from your friends. If you have a bunch of contacts who are constantly updating their Flickr accounts, then you definitely need this. You can easily comment on pictures too.
Flock 1.0 will have a handy Uploader button which will enable batch uploading of pictures. (In fact, it is already there in the beta).
Let's say someone has uploaded a pic into Photobucket site, and you come across it on some website. When you move your cursor over that picture, all of that person's pictures will appear in your photo toolbar.
Better RSS integration. YOu can subscribe to RSS feeds with one click, and organise them better too. Okay, only 5 % of the surfers use RSS feeds, but once you figure out how to do it and what to do with it, most get addicted to the convenience of RSS feeds.
Blogging too is made easier in Flock. You can drag text, pictures etc from web pages, add pictures from your own machine, and post it all together easily to several blog hosts. You can tag posts easily in Flock, too.
Most people seem to like the search feature, where the results start appearing as you type. In Flock, you can see answers from several search engines too, as you type in your query.
Using social bookmarking sites like del-icio-us also also becomes easier, and your bookmarks become automatically visible to your pals.
Does all this make it a compelling download? For those who want simple, fast surfing and less distractions, Flock 1.0 would be a messy browser to use, we think. On the other hand, there are many whose livs dependon Flickr, Blogger, MySpace and del-icio-us, and for them, Flock 1.0 would be irressistible.
|
