Flock, A new browser expiriment

27 Oct 2007

If you, like me, have never heard of Flock, let me tell you it seems to be an unintentionally well kept secret. Let me also say that I have heard of it before and blew it off for reasons I can’t even explain.

It was explained to me as a “Social Browser” and given my disdain for most social networks, I never gave it it a second thought. It turns out that for a blogger like me, Flock is a dream. I found it this weekend while searching for a decent blogging tool for OS X. I have been using Qumana, but really dislike it given my roots blogging with Windows Live Writer which much to the chagrin of the blogging community is by and far the absolute best blogging client available on any platform.

Alas, booting up Parallels and launching Windows Live Writer isn’t the most time efficient thing when I just want to bang out a quick blog, so I looked further for another tool to use when I just want to write out something quick.

It was in this search that I found that Flock has a blogging client built in and I set out to give it a go.

I will begin by saying that the blogging client in Flock is no Windows Live Writer. It’s not even a distant cousin to Live Writer. It is, however, a very light and friendly posting tool that I can call up with a quick shortcut whenever I want to post something.

It does have a decent feature set though, it supports Images, Lists, Indents, Basic Text Formatting, Tagging and more. It allows you to call up existing posts for editing, and it has a great web clipboard feature to let you collect resources and images for a post you have yet to start writing.

The browser itself is based off Mozilla and it’s very much like Firefox. As browsers like Flock and Firefox are very light when it comes to impacting your system, I recommend you install it and give it a look.

It also has a very social friendly side that I haven’t explored much that integrates with the usual social networks and photo tools.

Tags: Blogging, Firefox, Flock, Windows Live Writer