What the Flock? Flock the "Social Web Browser"
Today I’ve been testing out the Flock web browser, and I’m even using its built in blog posting feature to write this post. Flock totes itself as the “Social Web Browser” with extras for news feeds, social network sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Twitter. It also has built in support for Facebook’s instant messaging, and webmail services like Google’s Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and AOL Mail. There also seems to be support for the online bookmarking service Del.icio.us, and built in support for picture sharing sites like Photobucket, Google’s Picasa, and TinyPic, plus so many other blogs and services.
While the browser is visually pleasing, the interface seems reasonably well thought out, the appearance can be customized with skins or themes, and has a library of plug-in that can add features to it, plus most Firefox Add-ons will work too. I think it might actually be one of if not the most useful browser out there for doing research on the web. I’ll explain…
One of the features of Flock is its “Web Clipboard”. This little tool allows you to create folders or collections of things you’ve found on any subject. All you have to do is select them, and drag them over to the “Web Clipboard” tool. The things I know for certain that I can store are links, images, and selected bits of text from just about anywhere (including the address bar). I haven’t yet tried to drag things like YouTube videos yet, but they might work too, and if they don’t I can still drag the link for it over. If add the Zotero plugin for Firefox then you’ll have almost everything you need to be the Rock Star of your R&D Department or College dorm.
Their blog posting extension also has the “Web Clipboard” attached to it making it even easier to add the resources I’ve found to a blog post just by dragging them over.