I was in the list of people who wanted to try out Flock as soon as it was released as a limited beta. I recieved my invitation email two days ago and I was happy to have the opportunity to try out this anticipated new browser. Before I posted my review, I waited for a while to read what others had to say about it. Here is the list of posts about Flock on Technorati and the most recent posts tagged flock. As far as I can tell, the initial reaction to the browser is “very cool”.
My first impression was similar in that I thought Flock was cool. It is basically a browser built on top of Firefox with tight blogging, del.icio.us, and Flickr. Granted, Flock makes it dead easy to post to del.icio.us and access to the tags and bookmarks with the bookmark manager. In addition to that, it is very easy to post to your blog from Flock. It asks you a minimum number of questions about your blog settings and then does the rest to fill in the remaining settings. The blog posting window also has a topbar which displays Flickr photo strip from any username, or the previous blog post (I find this one very useful). There is also a box where you can supposedly drag a portion of a text from a webpage to automatically quote it. I say “supposedly” because this does not seem to work in this beta release. Neither does the indentation and linking buttons on the toolbar seem to work yet. There are lots of screenshots of Flock on Flickr.
One thing that I thought when I started playing with Flock was: “Why do I need another browser? Could not all the integration be achieved by a Firefox extension?” As I was thinking this I came across Chris Messina’s comment on this Flickr photostream. He basically says the functionality they wanted to implement was more than an extension could provide. So, I will take his response for that for now since the application is in its very early stages and I am sure they have a bigger vision for it.
The most fresh news about Flock is that it is now available as public beta as it is announced on the Flock webpage.