What I like about Flock
April 20th, 2008
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For those following me on Twitter (paulwoods) you will know that I have been playing around with ways to automate some of my online life. My ultimate goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes to do the regular things - like catching up on my favourite feeds, following folks on Twitter, keeping up with some of my favorite photographers on Flickr and much more.
My first attempt was to use Google’s iGoogle. iGoogle is essentially a start page which you can load a multitude of widgets into to follow almost anything. I can look at my Google Analytics data for the websites I run, my AdSense balance, my hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts, my Twitter feed, Facebook etc etc all from one page. Basically an instant time saving of about 10 minutes every day simply because I eliminated the need to bounce between 10 or so different sites.
iGoogle is good… except that there were a few things I felt were missing. The main one being that I could see all that great content, but I couldn’t do much with it.
Enter Flock!
Flock “The Social Web Browser” certainly lives up to its tagline.
I now have a browser that is pulling fresh data from my Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, GMail, Yahoo Mail and YouTube accounts. Not only can I interact with all of them directly from the browser interface… I can also pull content from any of them and blog about it using Flock’s “Blog This” functionality.
For example, this image is part of my Flickr photostream (that’’s me third from the right about to ride 70km on my dual suspension mountain bike!). All I had to do was drag and drop it into the Flock blog editor. How easy is that!
Compared to the Windows Live Writer blog editor which I have been using since it was released, the Flock Blog editor is a little light on. For example, I am unsure if this text will take on styles set out in my WordPress theme (the preview doesn’t really tell me much). But I am sure it will improve over time.
All in all… two big thumbs up for Flock. And I guess 15 minutes extra each day I can use to focus on the important things.
Tags: Flock
June 22nd, 2008 at 7:33 pm
i supoose flock has nothing which firefox cant do .
firefox addons create much better usability .
August 19th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Well, yes, you could build you own Flock from Firefox (as that is what the good people at Flock have done), however, Flock is a bit more than adding a few addons to Firefox - as is Songbird (though I don’t use it myself).