Flock - Productive social browsing

I finally decided to give Flock, a Mozilla based browser a go, and I’m very, very happy with the results so far. You can reap most of the benefits if you’re into social sites like Youtube, Del.icio.us and the bunch, but even if you’re not, it’s basically Firefox, so you can’t really go wrong.

My World

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My World is the default stat page for Flock and works like the Today page for Outlook, basically an aggregation of some of the info inside your browser. It shows you a list of your recently visited favorites, RSS feeds and media feeds. You can also access any of the sidebars and search the net if you’d like. I would say it’s a pretty useful start page, but those of you accustomed to Netvibes or Pageflakes won’t be changing their start page soon.

Sidebars

The sidebar has a central role in this browser because it allows you to view the status of your social network and do a lot of other things you would normally use a web page for. You can choose to view al your accounts, the people associated with them, take a look at your favorites, RSS feeds and manage your web clips.

Accounts and Services

This two pane sidebar shows your registered accounts on the top and available supported social sites on the bottom. Supported sites are the ones that Flock can directly interact with. One site I think should definitely be in there is Digg. It makes no sense that it isn’t, since it’s possibly one of the biggest of its kind. I have a feeling that they will support it, but want to develop some nice interactivity. A green light will indicate if you are signed on to a specific service, otherwise you can easily log out and tel Flock to forget the account. That’s about all there is to this sidebar, the main benefit is that you can easily log on to all your accounts quickly. One huge design flaw is that you can not make the top pane longer. I would like to see all my services without needing to scroll, and since I don’t really use the bottom pane, it would make sense to be able to resize it.

People

The people sidebar is again, a great addition. On top, you can choose between the sites, and after that, you will be able to see the people associated with that account. You can also interact with the sites through here, checking messages, going to the friend request page and so on. The feature most useful for me is notification. If you have a friend request it will be shown right there in the browser, no need to visit the page itself. Similarly with messages and so on.

RSS

The RSS feed sidebar is almost exactly like Google Reader, easy to use, comfortable and conveniently simple. It shows you the number of unread items, and you can set it to makr posts read as you scroll through them. One thing it was lacking was the dynamism in which Google reader treats scrolling. Google Reader marks posts read when they reach the top.The Flock RSS reader marks an entry read when it comes into view, which is not the best for me. Otherwise this is a perfect RSS viewer, I’m even switching from Google.

Favorites

The favorites sidebar is pretty standard, it uses the same beautiful interface as the rest of the app, but as an additional feature it can show you your oinline favorites, from Del.icio.us for example.

Web Clipboard

This is probably the most useful feature for research and general forget-me-not-in-the-short-run stuff. It will increase your productivity a lot, since you don’t need to have an app or another tab open,just drag and drop into the sidebar. It recognizes links, images and text, and displays them in a very convenient list.

Media bar

The media bar is actually a top bar, just like a sidebar, but at the top. It shows you media streams, and will most probably be used for photos and so on. It provides a nice photo slideshow, so you may even want it open when you’re not explicitly looking at it, just for soothing’s sake.

Blog editing

Flock also has a fully featured (sort of) blog editor. I don’t really want to get into this here, but for simple blogging it is definitely enough. Blogger, Typepad and Wordpress users will be able to use it, but it is compatible with some other services as well. You can add photos, write the body, add tags and post it, but I couldn’t get it to choose categories. Perhaps a plugin can take care of that, but as is, it won’t do for me.

Misc awesomeness

There are a lot of jewels hidden inside Flock. One such example is that it natively supports simultaneous bookmarking to multiple online sites. When you bookmark a page in Flock, you can choose to add it to one or more of your online services like Del.icio.us, Magnolia and so on. All your tags and comments will be migrated as well, I tested mainly on Delicious and it works like a charm.

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There’s a great system for helping first time users get acquainted with the browser. Drop down alerts (like the pop up alerts in Firefox) drift into view when a Flock-type action is available. For example, if you log in to your Youtube account, it will ask you if you want to add it to your Flock browser. It also shows you a drop down notification every time you encounter and RSS, but thankfully you can disable all further notifications. There are three buttons next to the URL bar that light up when specific options are available. The first highlights when a media stream is present, the second one shows RSS feeds, and the third one shows search engine. Whenever you land on a page with a search engine in it, it you can add it to Flock to be able to search through that engine directly in the search field. There are numerous such little things that I am finding constantly that make my life that bit more easier and productive or organized. I’m sure I will stumble on to many more.

Interface

If you’ve been using Firefox, the interface will feel like home. The skin is pretty nice, for once I chose not to change it. The biggest difference is the toolbar position and style, which looks and acts great. The toolbar on the left is the default Flock toolbar with access to places like My World, Accounts and so on (more on this later), and the toolbar on the left is the bookmarks toolbar. What I found really useful was that I could integrate buttons and toolbars right into the default Flock toolbar, like my Stumbleupon toolbar and FireFTP button. Not a huge deal, but I was surprised at this flexibility.

Final verdict

I know it sounds weird, but I am now using Flock instead of Firefox. It has everything Firefox does, plus a LOT more, especially if you use social sites. It looks good, has great added features and is a joy to browse with. Firefox plugins of course work seamlessly, and I mean, I haven’t had so much fun browsing in ages. There are some things that could still be in here natively, like Stumbleupon and Digg support, a cool FTP client, the blogging tool could be developed (especially with Flickr being so readily available) and a lot more, but these would be just the cherry on top, the foundations are amazing. I recommend Flock to anyone and everyone.