Flock 1.0 is out. For those who haven’t heard about it, it is “a social web browser” that integrates services from the social sites, making them easier to use. So far, it is going well. Last time I checked it out it was in some alpha or beta phase. Also, I wasn’t a big user of social sites, so it was not attractive to me. This morning I read on TechCrunch that Flock 1.0 is out, so I decided to give it a try. Here’s my report :).

Right after the first start it asked me if I want it to import bookmarks, passwords and settings from Firefox. It went fine - just select what you want to import and move on.

You are greeted with My World - a portal which presents your Favorite Pages, Feeds and Media. It is nice and clean, but I think there are some other sites that gives much better experience. In my opinion, My World is not planned as a big feature in Flock. Ok, let’s move on…

I like how they put the buttons for sidebars next to the Bookmarks toolbar. And they don’t take up much space, which is a plus. The People sidebar will give you updates from your accounts: Twitter, Facebook… The Media bar is a nice feature. You can search and then view the results from various media sites (obviously) inside the bar. I also like the Favorites bar. You can choose where you want to save your bookmarks - on your computer, online favorites site, or both. The thing that I like the most is the blog writer. Just start it, setup your account and write a post. There are links all around Flock that say “Blog this”, so it is easy to blog about something immediately. I still haven’t checked out the Web clipboard, so I don’t know how useful is it.

If you want to use Flock to its max, you should allow it to remember your accounts. It will do that automatically when you log in on those sites. Though, I have encountered one problem - it wasn’t able to remember my WordPress account. This is a known bug and there is a workaround: launch blog writer, skip the setup part and then do it manually (Edit -> Configure blog accounts).

So far, I have to say that I like it. I would like to see support for Google’s Picasa and Last.fm. Also, it would be nice if the Flock dev team could support upload and management of files to WordPress accounts.
In conclusion: if you are a social sites user, you will like it. Otherwise, I think that you won’t find too much use for its features.

*update* Great… I have just found out that it didn’t set the tags for this post, even though I wrote them.
*update#2* Oh, it did set the tags, but not the WordPress’.

*update after few days* Well, I have looked a bit and found out that everything I needed from Flock is already there for Firefox. The only thing that is missing is the Media bar.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, internet, social, browser, software, review