Sleight of Blog

You MUST use the web browser Flock

I want to tell you a little bit today about something I just discovered and it is a cool browser called Flock. Now if you're into social bookmarking you're gonna want this browser.

I am going to explain a little bit about the features of Flock.

Obviously you have to download the browser and you have to be aware that it is not yet possible to import your bookmarks from Internet Explorer or Firefox.

I have added my Firefox bookmarks simply by opening two different browser windows and copying and pasting the URL and then adding to favorites.

Once you have installed the browser, the very first page you come to is a page called "my world"and this is basically your main page where you can add your favorite feeds and you will be able to see your friends activities from other social forums like for example Facebook, YouTube or Flickr.


On the very top of your browser you're going to see something called a media stream. And for every website you go to this is going to detect if there's any media such as photos or video on that particular page and it will be displayed there.

Another thing you gonna find is some small icons that are displayed right on the top. The first little icon is the planet and that's going to take you to your "my world" page. The next icon is where it gets really fun! When you click on that, you get to sign in to any social place online that you're a member of and your friends will be displayed on a sidebar so you can watch their activities on for example Youtube or Facebook.

It also gets much easier to share stuff with your friends.

I'm going to give you an example. I have a buddy on Facebook called Will Chandler - I can easily view his media stream by clicking on the media button right under his name. His media will then be displayed in the media stream I mentioned before on top of the browser.

Under his name there is also an actions button which enables me to either message him, share a link or write on his Facebook wall.

Next little icon is of course the media stream and you just click on it if you want to see any media on the page you're at.

The next button will give you a feed sidebar where you can add feeds from any page that you visit. The cool thing is that when you're on a page, a little orange button will flash if there is a feed on that particular page. How cool is that?

The next icon shows an envelope and that is of course your e-mail inbox. You can sign in to a lot of popular e-mail services like Yahoo mail or Google . Once you're signed in it will automatically check your e-mail box for you .

The next icon displays some little stars and if you press that button, you go to your favorites sidebar - no need to explain what that's for . A cool feature is you can categorize your favorites so you don't get them all mixed together and you can add your own categories .

Now we have a picture of a little key and if you click on that you go to something called the "accounts and services" sidebar and this is where you manage all of your accounts and online services that you're a member of . You sign in to for example YouTube, Flickr, mail account, blog service and stuff like that .

Next feature is the web clipboard where you just drag and drop text or links or images that you want to see even use later .

Flock comes with a built-in blog editor which is also a nice feature but I have to say this: it is not possible to upload photos from your hard drive so you always have to enter the URL of the photo you want to post and that gets quite tiresome after a while.

Besides, you might be tempted to just add the photos you find from different websites online and forget all about other people's copyrights!

Here comes the beautiful thing: Flock actually works with some Firefox add-ons and the one I always use for blogging is called Scribefire. It works beautifully with Flock! Just create your accounts and start blogging! With Scribefire you do get the option to simply drag and drop an image into your post and it will upload automatically. You also have the option the post the same entry to multiple blogs (Google rank hates it, I love it).

Flock also comes with a photo uploader which is cool for somebody like me who adds a lot of photos to my posts. You just drag your photos into the gray bar that you see on top and you can upload to any photo account that you have online, such as Flickr or Post to Facebook. You can upload up to 1000 images in a batch!

I definately think I'm going to stick with this browser because of the many extra features - I find it much more exciting to use than Firefox, especially the social aspect of it!

What do you think? Do you have experience with Flock?

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