Obligatory Flock Post
I started using Flock about a year ago when I read a review of it somewhere. I’d been running Firefox before that, but I wanted to try something new. I downloaded it and was immediately hooked by all the cool features.
While they’ve made a couple changes since that first developer preview that I seriously disagree with, I think that the project’s generally moving in the right direction. Since they’re hungry for all the press they can get, they’re constantly appealing to us to blog Flock - I fgured it was about time I did it. So here goes…
Flock’s main selling point is its integration with the “social web” - it is, for the time being, a browser for the Web 2.0 (I don’t know how long they’ll keep using that language; apparently, the age of Web 3.0 is already upon us). Which raises an important issue - does the world really need another browser? After all, we have IE 6 for the massive, mindless herd of M$ slaves, Safari for the slightly smaller herd of mindless Mac slaves, Opera for performance nuts, Firefox for the counterculture, and IE 7 for the countercounterculture (or at least, the extremely gullible). So is there really a need or a place for more?
Based on my experience with Flock, the answer is a resounding ‘Yes’.
For Web-2 junkies like myself, the new capabilities of the internet have completely changed the browsing experience, and browsers have been slow to catch up. Opera ‘widgets’ are generally a joke, and there are few FF extensions that offer something better than desktop-based blogging tools. So what makes Flock different? The Flock people have been very careful to say that Flock is meant for everyone, but when it comes down to it Flock is really a blogger’s browser. Being able to drag-and-drop pictures from your desktop into your myspace profile is cute, but no reason to change browsers. What does make Flock so powerful is the ability to drag and drop anything from the web into a blog, and all within one integrated application.
The blog editor itself is fairly simple, which is just right for me. Being based in the application rather than a website, it’s very fast and stable, and is immenselly preferable to the atrocious rich text editor offered by the folks at WP. I miss the old versions of Flock in which the blog editor was integrated into the main browser window, but the current incarnation works perfectly well.
I think that Flock has a long way to go before it can really play with the big boys and girls, but I have faith that it will get there eventually.
Done. Now I can go report myself to the authorities with a clean conscience.
*** EDIT ***
Ironically, the Flock blog poster is not posting right now (this is the first time it’s ever happened, and I’m inclined to blame WP. The WP rich editor, thankfully, has also vanished).
*** EDIT #2 ***
OK, something weird is definitely going on with WP right now. I’m getting no confirmation of success and this post just got posted twice. Such is war…
*** EDIT #3 ***
Where did my categories go, dammit?
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