Flock

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To continue in the vein of technology things that I like, I cannot go very long without talking about Flock. Built on the Mozilla technology, Flock is a browser – on steroids. The good folks at Flock used APIs for some of our favorite services to create this robust, multi-dimensional “Social web browser” application. For those who are familiar with Mash-Ups – this is one of them.

On the left-hand side, you have multiple icons that activate these extra features. Click the People icon, and you get a list of your Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter friends complete with statuses. Click on the Media icon to see photos on Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook, and others. Click on the Favorites icon, and see your favorites including those you may have on Magnolia. Also in the side bar are RSS feeds, a quick blogger editor, and a PhotoUploader.

My favorite sidebar feature is the Web Clipboard. If you find a snippet of code, a photograph, or an article you would like to reference later, you can highlight it and drag it to the clipboard. This enables you to pull it up again for future reference without having to find the word document or text file you would have used in the past.

Flock has become my browser of choice at home. Everything is at my finger tips. What are the shortcomings? No integration with MySpace, but I have to blame MySpace’s lack of public APIs for that. That’s really the only thing I am missing. Oh, and I have to mention how responsive Flock is to their community. About a month ago, a feature on the sidebar stopped working. I posted a message for help, several other people said they had the same issue, a patch was released two days later. Not bad for an open source application. Give it a try.

What do you think?

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