I’ve been playing around with the beta of flock, the new browser that integrates with Flickr, delicious and your blog tools, as well as providing new search functions. At first glimpse flock looks like the integration a user like me needs. For example being slow on the uptakethe first thing I did to blog flock was come back to my WordPress write window, when in fact I could more easily have blogged direct from the browser. I also struggle with uploading photographs to my blog and flock promises to simplify that.
My deficincies make me a poor content co-creator which is why I, and I guess many people like me, will be on the look out for tools that allow us to project our ideas and creations on the web. For example I’m poor at RSS, but I’m a journalist. I need to be proficient in publishing, organising and using RSS.
I was a long term Opera user and when I switched back to Internet Explorer, to test the IE 7 beta, I found it troublesome not to have my last session automatically there for me next time I turned the computer on. IE 7’s tabs is progress for MS but not when they disappear. Opera saved them all automatically.
Though I like IE 7’s way with RSS feeds there’s much to like too about flock, like having a news feed organiser, a toolbar for organising and uploading photographs linked to flickr, an alert for when sites upload new photographs, and having a pop up from which to blog.
Flock claims to be able to integrate web search with the browser history but when I fed in a keyword from a site URL I use regularly it failed to return that site. Either I did something wrong of flock is over-claiming on that one.
All in all though a great product and given that IE 7 is in beta without many of these features (though it does have the beginnings of an extensive plug-in library) it’ll be fascinating to see how the browser battles shape up. The more integrated functionality the better for people like me. Next – integrating video editing. That would be awesome.
