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Flock 2.0 Beta: Using Firefox 3 to Bring It All Together

June 16, 2008

Bringing it all together. That’s the theme of 2008: How to integrate multiple online accounts, activities, profiles, feeds, etc. into one comprehensive service (which is of course aside from the just as popular Web 2.0 theme of having scalability issues and crashing).

For the past three years Flock has been aggressively pursuing their goal of ‘bringing it all together’ with their unique social Web browser that connects people, lets them share media, and makes it easier for users to blur the lines between multiple online accounts.

Today the service announced that the Flock 2.0 Beta, built on the latest Firefox 3 technology, is finally available for free early trials and test runs. The new service combines its classic enhanced browsing capabilities in conjunction with the latest performance, security, and UI enhancements of Firefox 3.

I must admit that I was not very impressed by Flock’s 1.0 version, but — being a social media blogger and all- hearing the words ‘early trials and test runs’ made me feel as giddy as Robert Scoble at Twitter Prom. I immediately strapped on my investigative suit and proceeded to download Flock 2.0. The first thing I noticed was that it was fast. Flock was never unbearably slow, but I do recall it being somewhat of a ‘thinker’ when it came to switching between its features. And oh there were features. Most are the same as before, like the ability to integrate your Digg, Pownce, and AOL Mail into the ‘profiles’ sidebar. But there were also new features such as the auto-completion in the location bar, the ‘favorites’ and ‘download’ managers, and the improved ‘password manager.’

My Twitter feed updated every five seconds — much faster than Twhirl has lately — and there were dozens of new add-ons that could be downloaded, most notably Evernote’s exclusive beta add-on.

Overall, I was very pleased with Flock the second time around. Its default skin was just as attractive as it has always been (even though it’s unfortunate that there wasn’t a wide selection of different skins — one of Firefox’s popular features).

My favorite features were the ability to open all tabs at once, and the media stream, which compiles different users’ pictures and videos in a horizontal slideshow view. I also liked the ease with which I could share, e-mail, or blog any media I came across in the browser, but the blog editor itself is very plain and underwhelming.

(Via Mashable!.)

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