After watching Liz Davis' great screencast about using Mozilla's "social browser," Flock (a browser-on-steroids), I decided to try it out again. I'd downloaded it awhile ago and never really fully gave it a chance. Gotta say that I'm not totally loving all of it yet, but I might grow to like it better.
I love several of the web2.0-ish aspects of it. For example, I'm blogging from it right now! note: posting from Flock didn't work tonite, although I tested it a few days ago and it was fine, so maybe a glitch??? I'm getting used to the feed reader--I have always preferred using an rss aggregator add-on to my Firefox. It's my favorite way to read my collected feeds, although it is limited, of course, since it resides in the browser. Flock has the same problem, but I'm not comfortable with the Flock interface quite yet.
I also love, love, LOVE the clipboard sidebar in Flock, which enables you to simply drag any item--photo, link, video, pdf--to the clipboard so that you can later use it in a blog post, google doc, etc. easily. Very convenient!
Flock seems to be a little....cumbersome....to me in some ways though. It takes a bit of time to load (aren't we impatient these days...), and there are several tools that I'm not that interested in right now. I love my Firefox browser because it's light and I can add whatever add-ons I know I'm going to use. Flock seems interesting enough to use it for a while though--I may love it in the end!
3 comments:
Hey Jamie,
Thanks for the writeup about Flock! I wanted to comment on a few things.
-We're not actually created by Mozilla, although we do use the Firefox codebase. Flock is a company, and you can see our pretty faces at www.flock.com/about. :)
-What glitch did you run into trying to post your blog with Flock? I can try to figure out what the issue is with you.
-Any notes you can give on how to make less cumbersome would be much appreciated...it's feedback from people like you that make this product better!
-FYI, most Firefox add-ons will work in Flock. Just give them a try.
Flock'n'roll!
Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com
Thanks for commenting, Evan! Sorry for the inaccuracy about Mozilla too.
When I tried to post from Flock the other night, as I hit publish, my computer locked up. I eventually used task manager to get all my apps closed & it cleared up. I'd copied my post to my clipboard before I tried to publish, so I just copied it in Blogger and posted. I did a test post through Flock the other day though, and it worked fine, so I don't know what the prob was. Soon as I have another deep thought (heehee) I'll try again!
I shouldn't have used the word cumbersome probably. It's more that there are so many social networking features intrinsic to Flock, that I haven't decided which ones to use and which ones don't fit into my world. I like Firefox because I can use the add-ons that I want and don't have to have a bunch that are not useful to me. I recognize though that you don't know what you like--you only like what you know! So I'm sticking with Flock for a while to see how it fits!
One problem I've encountered is that I can't figure out how to get my delicious browser buttons installed. Am I missing something obvious?
Hey Jamie,
Thanks for the details!
Let me know if the blog editor issue sparks up again, and how you get used to Flock's options after some more use.
You should be able to install the delicious extension into Flock just like normal...what issue are you running into? FYI our Star button can be set to publish to delicious...just log in to delicious, and then go to the properties for a favorite. There you can set it to always publish to delicious and locally, just delicious, just locally, etc.
Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com
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