The Flock Has Landed

The folks over at Flock have released a developer preview of their much-anticipated social browser. You can get Flock for Windows, Mac OSX or Linux.

So what the heck is Flock, and why should you care?

Well, it’s a browser, first and foremost. And the browser market is a tough one to break into. But at the same time, there hasn’t been much really new or exciting in the browser world in the past five years or so. Enter Flock.

First of all, Flock is a good browser. The interface is simple and uncluttered. It offers tabbed browsing, it’s highly configurable and it uses the same keystroke combos I’d expect (i.e. Ctrl-Tab opened a new tab).

What makes it interesting is the social aspect. They’ve integrated Flock with blogging, photo sharing and favorite sharing.

The blog button opens an edit window that lets you draft and publish entries to most popular blogging systems, including Movable Type. I’m composing this very blog entry using Flock. You can also use it to edit your existing blog entries. And of course, you can drag-and-drop content from any website to your blog window to add it to your entry or quote it. Wicked cool.

While I’m blogging, I can click on the Flickr topbar (like you see in the screenshot above) and drag images directly from Flickr into my blog entry. It doesn’t get any easier, and easy is good.

As for favorites (bookmarks, or whatever you prefer to call them), Flock integrates with del.icio.us, giving you integrated management of all your bookmarks and even the tags. I recently wrote about the virtues of del-icio.us — Flock makes del.icio.us even tastier.

So how does Flock run? So far, no serious problems. The blog editor sometimes gave me a little grief when I tried to drag an image to the left of a paragraph, but otherwise it’s running great! Flock integrates with all the tools that I’m already using, and does so very elegantly. Up until now, I’ve been using a combination of Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox (with much more emphasis on Firefox of late), but Flock just might make me rethink that.

Website: www.flock.com