Last week (or maybe the week before, I forget), the first public beta release of my favorite web browser, Flock, was released. Naturally I was eager to put it through its paces. I’m glad to say that this is an even better browser than before, with one or two exceptions. In my view Flock has made the social web experience even easier and better because of big improvements in photo website integration (Photobucket and Flickr), blogging capabilities, and RSS.

This isn’t going to be a full blown or scientific review but instead a list of observations, likes and dislikes, etc.:

• The photo integration is really nice. Now I have the option in the topbar to browse my photos or anyone else’s on a particular topic (tag) if those photos are on Photobucket or Flickr. More than that, I now have the ability to browse these photos in small OR large sizes, and I have easy drag and drop capability to add photos into other applications or a blog entry. For example, just this morning I decided to see what photos folks have posted on Flickr from the American Library Assoication annual conference being held right now in New Orleans. I simply input the tag ‘ala2006′ and was able to quickly call up new and recent photos taken by librarian colleagues. Pretty nice!
• The blog integration is handled in a better way. Before, I was able to post to my blog from a topbar element. Now, with a simple keystroke (Ctrl+B) I can call up a separate, smaller window and immediately begin blogging. After clicking on the Publish button I am then presented with further choices such as what categories I want to assign and what Technorati tags I want to use. While this whole process took a little getting used to at first (because in the previous iteration, choices for tags and categories were on the main blog posting window) I like this new way of doing things much better.
• The RSS feed capabilities are nice but they are the weakest feature at this point. I keep getting script errors and/or funky results whenever I try to use the RSS aggregator sidebar. Hopefully this will work itself out soon. When it works, though, the sidebar arrangement and functionality are nice.
• A big drawback for me for Flock was that there weren’t many native extensions available for it. (You couldn’t just use Firefox extensions, for example, of which there seem to be hundreds.) This is no longer a problem because with this beta release there is now a whole host of extensions available that can be readily used with Flock. I’ve had no problems with the ones I like to use except for FasterFox. It is great now to be able to use the ones I like the most in Firefox.
• There is a new Conversations topbar plugin available that works much better than the previous Technorati topbar ever did. It’s basically the same as the old Technorati topbar but seemingly reengineered and renamed. I find this a very useful feature when I want to have some sense of what others might be saying about a particular website I’m interested in. When used in combination with the Google Web Comments plugin, I feel like I am able to get a pretty comprehensive sense of the “conversations” that are going on about that website.
• The del.icio.us integration is also much smoother than before.
• A really big, important new feature in this beta release is the Quick Search functionality, which integrates several areas into one truly quick search, such as your favorites, your web history, the top five hits from Yahoo!, and a quick way to pick other search engines to search in as well as whatever default search engine you’ve chosen. Again it takes a little getting used to but I am quite impressed with how it works thus far.

I am still surprised that there doesn’t seem to be that much use of or experimentation with this browser among librarian colleagues. Maybe there is stuff going on and I don’t realize it. I’ve used Flock (even the alpha releases) as my default browser for many months now and I have no problem recommending it to anyone. When the students in my course this summer saw me using it and talking about it, some of them decided to try it out, too. One of them found a thorough review on ExtremeTech and posted about it to the class blog.

I also should point out that I use different flavors of Flock. On my Windows laptop from work, I installed Flock on my portable USB drive and it works great. On my PowerBook at home, it also works great.

So…bottom line: If you blog, use photo sharing sites, or just appreciate a functional web browser, try Flock. I think you’ll like it.