I’ve read some criticism that Flock is nothing more than Firefox with a bunch of extensions tacked on. After playing with it for a while, that’s also my technical impression.
But technical is not what’s getting me excited about Flock. It’s the sum of the parts that gives a whole new user experience. That means I can do things differently.
I can fire a blog post from Firefox. But it takes me to the rudimentary WordPress editor page. Flocks has a nice WYSIWYG blog post editor that’s a marvel to use. It does the quoting and citation for me. It lets me drag images from the Web, or my flickr stream straight into the post. It just makes posting so much more fun.
The feed viewer is a nice touch. Call it a topic-collapsable view of the Web page. It actually makes RSS (and yes, you too, Atom) a publishing and structuring format, a way to view a Web page, not just get the recent post updates.
The favorites are taggable and integrated with del.icio.us. But while Firefox has extensions that let you imagine what it would be like to integrate del.icio.us and tag your bookmarks … if only they would actually work and the UI was useable … Flock just does it.
If you’re counting feature for feature, five minutes of downloading Firefox extensions will lift your spirits and make your browser Web 2.0 buzzword compliant. But if you’re looking at useability, if you want to get more done, then Flock gets you there.
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