Flock - Get Social

I've been keeping my eye on a new developing browser, Flock. It isn't out yet, but its feature set looks great. To sum it up in a roundabout way, Flock is going to make it easier to interact with the internet's best social sites. Sites like Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Blogger.

Flock will have built-in ways to upload pictures to Flickr, the web's best picture sharing service. You could spend less time going to the Flickr site, signing in, and uploading pictures. Flickr is already an easy service to use, and if Flock makes it even easier, then we're bound to see more interesting pictures. I'm sure that when Flock comes out there will be a flurry of new Flickr accounts opened.

Flock will also make posting to your blog easier. It has a built-in post composer, and will post to your blog directly, so you don't have to venture to Blogger, or your site's MT or WP frontend. Again, making it easier to post will make people more inclined to blog. I know I would be more apt to post a link to a cool site I just found, or a thought I just entertained if I didn't haven't to venture to Blogger to do so. It's going to support all the major blogging engines. Blogger, MovableType, and WordPress that I know of, probably more. You would see a lot more posts here on Slack Off, I can tell you that up front.

Flock's bookmarking system directly posts your bookmarks to your del.icio.us account. This both makes it easy to get to your bookmarks from any computer, and fun to organize them. If you don't know how del.icio.us works, you should. You make a list of links, and give each links tags (like: "games", "politics", "movies", "cheese"). You can search through the del.icio.us userbase and find cool sites you would never have come across on your own. If you're ever bored, and want a cool site to read, del.icio.us has you covered.

Flock will also have a great RSS and Atom feed reader, so you can bookmark a site's feed and read it's content without having to load the full site. Currently Safari, and to a lesser extent IE7, do this very well, I hope Flock can pull it off. Most people are still in the dark when it comes to web feeds, maybe with how easy Flock will make it, more people will see the light. I know that my readers bookmark my site's feed in FireFox as a "LiveBookmark", so this feature will be easy to get into.

I hope they plan to add more extensions as time goes on. A streamlined way to post stories to Digg would be a godsend, as I read Digg a great deal. Maybe a way to send documents to Writely? Upload a file to YouSendIt? Read, not just check my Gmail? The future looks bright.

I can't wait.