Flock - First Impressions
Flock is billed as the Social Web Browser. Being somewhat anti-social, it didn’t seem to be anything that I really would use. I mean, I blog, have a flickr page and use LinkedIn, but I really didn’t use any of the “Social Networking” sites. This weekend though, I wanted to upload a bunch of pictures to Flickr and saw that Flock had built in Flickr support. So I though I would give it a try. After playing around with it for a couple hours, I thought I would give my impressions.
The Good:
- The Flickr integration is pretty sweet. Support for batch uploading, tagging, and commenting make it really handy for uploading digital pictures.
- The interface is pretty slick. Flock is built upon Firefox, but the interface looks alot more polished.
- Built in Web notebook. - This is such a handy feature that every browser should have it standard.
- Built in blogging tools. - Clicking on Flock’s Blogging Icon pops up an editor and away you go.
- Gmail integration. - Builtin Gmail support is a really nice feature.
- Simple install - Just unzip and run.
The Bad:
- Constant informational messages. Every time Flock detects a “Media Stream” (RSS, Atom, etc..) it will pop up a notification telling you it can add it. You can turn these off, but it gets a bit annoying.
- The blogging tool is a bit primitive. As far as I can tell, there was no way to edit the time stamp of a post, so you couldn’t type up three posts, and schedule them for the next three days.
The Ugly:
- This is not really Flock’s problem, but the evil SmartFilter proxy at my place of employment won’t even let me open Flocks webpage to download it. Since I like a consistent setup across my PCs having gone tool on the home PC and one on the work PC was a bad outcome.
Flock has some real potential, but right now the setup I work off of (Firefox with the Google Notebook plugin and the ScribeFire blogging plugin) seems to meet my needs better. Not being able to schedule posts for later dates was a complete deal breaker for me as i generally write several posts at once and schedule them for publication later. I will continue using it for hte Flickr integration though, which was just great.
