SOFTWARE - BROWSERS - 28.11.2008

Flocking together

Based on Firefox

Flock 2.0 (http://www.flock.com) is a browser built on the principles of the Firefox 3.0 engine, so Firefox users will immediately feel at home. This dedicated browser makes it child’s play to keep in touch with your friends and share things with them. For instance, to manage online bookmarks, create blog posts and share video clips, it’s no longer necessary to access different websites. Everything can be done from within Flock itself. The only thing you need to do, after installing the browser, is to enter the login details of all your social networks and Web 2.0 sites. You can log in to, say, Gmail and then click on Remember Account in Flock. From now own, Flock will notify you of all new e-mail, while a Gmail icon is added to your browser which lets you send messages and view your inbox without having to surf to the actual Gmail website.

Using Flock

The strength of Flock as a “social” browser resides in the special sidebar which you can open at any time. By clicking on the appropriate icon sitting at the top of this sidebar, you can launch your favourite service straightaway. Flock’s main icons are reviewed below.

People. This icon allows you to log in to Facebook or MySpace (LinkedIn is unfortunately absent from the list). You will immediately see the status of your friends on these sites, the messages they’ve sent, the open invitations, etc. You can send them a message from Flock, send photos and videos which you only need to drag from a webpage, etc. In fact, you can do almost everything that is possible within Facebook or MySpace without having to surf to these sites themselves.

Media. This icon lets you search for public videos in YouTube, or if you’re logged in to Flickr or Picasa, for private photos that you’ve posted. If you like someone else’s photos, you can subscribe to their photo album. You will be notified when they post new photos online. Using the Photo Uploader icon, you can select up to 1,000 photos on your hard disk and upload them to Flickr or Picasa in one go. You can even edit the photos first by cropping them or giving them a title.

Blog. When you’re logged in to your Blogger or Typepad account, you can compose a blog post from within Flock. It has a special editor for this purpose, and using drag-and-drop you can easily add photos and videos from the webpage you’re viewing. There’s a Clipboard sidebar for temporarily storing text clips, web addresses and images from webpages, until you need them in a blog post that you plan to write at a later date. It’s very convenient for fervent bloggers!

Bookmarks and RSS feeds. You can easily create bookmarks and synchronise them directly with online bookmark sites such as de.licio.us. Subscribing to newsfeeds is possible as well, and you can read them within Flock. Indeed, Flock 2.0 is one of the first browsers to support “Media RSS” - feeds which consist entirely of photos and videos and which are already available on sites such as blip.TV (http://blip.tv) or SmugMug (http://www.smugmug.com).

Tip. Flock also supports the majority of the popular Firefox extensions. Check out http://www.youtube.com/user/HowToFlock for detailed information on Flock. The only downside is that this particular browser has not heard of any European social networking sites.