I haven’t looked at Flock for a long time, so I thought it was time I did. If you’ve not heard about Flock before, it’s a social web browser, which means that it’s designed to integrate with all the social networking services such as Facebook, MySpace, bebo, Twitter, Digg and all the in-crowd. But it also supports your webmail (well, Google, AOL and Yahoo, anyway), has an integrated blog editor that will even support self-hosted blogs (like this one), and even adds Facebook Chat into its own status bar. So what’s not to like?

Well there’s plenty to like, first of all. Not only does Flock support these social media it does so effortlessly – you don’t have to re-enter passwords and Flock will support whichever accounts you log into. You do have to grant it application access for Facebook and Twitter, but you’d have to do that for TweetDeck or other applications – it’s the way those services work, not Flock. Generally speaking the process with Flock is painless, transparent and ridiculously easy to use.

As usual, Flock is based on an older version of Firefox – version 3.0.6 according to the about box – so it’s not bang up to date with regards to HTML 5 and all those goodies. There’s no direct way to install Firefox plugins, but you can do it by searching addons.mozilla.org directly and downloading them from there.

The RSS reader bears resemblance to Google Reader rather than Feedreader or akregator, so I personally don’t tend to use it, but it’s nice to have (Flock doesn’t have Firefox’s Live Bookmarks). That said, in the RSS sidebar you can change the default RSS reader to the application of your choice, so it’s all fixable.

There aren’t many search engines either – even in the list on the Flock website – but you can use the Mycroft Project to add search engine if you’re unhappy with their default list (my search engine of choice these days is IXQuick, which isn’t on it).

They’re adding more services all the time, but what I’d like to see next is some sort of “next event” integration with either Google or Yahoo calendar. And some nice Meebo integration would be truly awesome.

Either way, I’m not complaining too hard – you either prefer Firefox or Flock. Probably, I’ll keep both around, mainly because I’m more familiar with Firefox and its plugins. I do like Flock’s integration (especially when it comes to Digg), but other than that I’m not particularly crazy about it. The probability is that I’ll use them both, and Flock will mainly stay around for its blog editor, if nothing else.

My verdict? 7 out of 10…

Tags: AOL, bebo, browser, Digg, Facebook, Firefox, Flock, GMail, Google, ixQuick, Meebo, Mycroft Project, MySpace, Twitter, Yahoo

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 20:00 and is filed under Applications, WWW. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.