so.there.we.were

As part of my everyday digging through the “net”, I came across a new (to me) browser that has now replaced Firefox as my preferred means of accessing the interwebs. Flock bills itself as a “social media browser” with functionality for handling almost all of your various social network updates, connections and uploads.

As you can see from the screenshot above, I have mine set up to access my Facebook, Twitter (feel free to follow me), Flickr, Pownce and Digg accounts. There is also a del.icio.us utility built in, but that doesn’t display over in the People Sidebar (that’s what that mess over there on the left is called). I also hid a couple of other toolbars and what-not that aren’t really fit for public consumption as they deal with some client stuff.

As well, as keeping me updated on the statii (word?) of my friends and connections, the browser is completely interactive, allowing me to update my Facebook status, send tweets, Digg stories and upload pictures to Flickr. I can also post directly to my blog from within the built-in blog editor, which I don’t do because of the way this thing is set up. But I could, that’s the point. So, forget about which Twitter app is going to clutter my desktop, this solves that problem immediately.

Flock also detects your friends media streams and allows you to favorite them so that you can pull them up to view new pics, videos or whatever without having to visit their page to do so. It also allows you to immediately share pictures, videos and links by just dragging and dropping them onto the People Sidebar. All in all, a ridiculously simple and efficient way of keeping up with this tangled web I have woven for myself.

The best thing of all is really the most geeky. Flock is powered by Mozilla and as such functions off the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox. For the layperson, this means that it is just as secure and stable as Firefox and has the capability to handle most Firefox extensions and add-ons. In fact, I have yet to find an add-on that doesn’t work. You just have to go to the Firefox add-on page and cheat fight the extensions into installing on Flock, which it does automatically because both browsers function in the same way.

Needless to say, I’m now a Flockstar (that’s what Flock fans are called) and am spreading the word. If you find yourself spending the better part of your free web time (is there such a thing?), logging into a bunch of different accounts trying to keep up with everyone, this is the answer for you.

I’m currently using Flock 1.2 beta, which features the new Pownce and Digg capability, and I have read rumors that MySpace and Last.fm hooks are being written in for an upcoming release, or at least I really hope they are. Actually, I could care less about MySpace nowadays, but Last.fm would be sweet. Are you listening Flock team?

Don’t forget that you can find me on a bunch of different places on the web, just click the fancy little icons over near the top of my sidebar.

Enjoy your social media browsing and feel free to drop me a line and let me know how you like it.