Flock: A social browser

I downloaded the new Flock browser yesterday to give it try. If you haven't heard of it, it is a browser based on the Mozilla codebase, and with a lot of social software a integrated

Flock includes a built-in RSS reader, which allows a user to read all of their favourite blogs in one place, without the need to separately navigate to each one. Various Web sites and software programs already provide this functionality, but Flock is one of the first to integrate it into a Web browser.

The browser also facilitates blogging by the user with a "Create a blog post" button located in the main navigation bar. The button launches a sophisticated blogging tool which integrates on a drag and drop level with Flickr, a popular online photo management and sharing service which was recently acquired by Yahoo.

Flock integrates with a number of popular blogging services, for example, Wordpress, Six Apart and Blogger, according to Decrem's own blog.

[ZDnet]

This is however a developer beta, so expect a lot of rough edges and bugs. I was mostly interested in the built-in blogging tools, but I couldn't test it since Flock freezed up when it tried to connect to Blogger. Ah well, there is still a lot of good stuff in it, like Favourites synced with del.icio.us, the Shelf which works somewhat like Scrapbook for Firefox and aggregated RSS reader.

I found Flock very interesting, but I can't help thinking; "couldn't this be done in Firefox?" Flock may be riding the wave at the moment, but I expect that the same functionality will appear in Firefox eventually. Meanwhile, try Flock.

[Screenshot from Ramblin' Gamblin']