Managing Social Media Madness with Flock

David Brown sent out a twit last week about the latest release of the Flock browser so I had no choice but to go check it out. After kicking the tires a bit I have to say I do in fact like it. The install is simple enough, you can have it up and running in no time at all, plus it imports your Firefox bookmarks so you aren’t starting from scratch. Unfortunately, even though Flock uses Firefox under the covers, none of the existing Firefox plugins came across during the install. Bummer. Whoever figures out how to maintain Firefox extensions centrally so you get the same web experience regardless of which computer you are using will be the next internet millionaire.

I started by spending a little time getting all my social media network sites configured. The initial My World home page is a bit overwhelming. I think the idea is to give you every possible option on one page so you don’t have to dig for features. Clicking on the Accounts and Services icon allows me to set up my accounts from Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and Del.icio.us to name a few. Flock has pre-built accounts for these services along with many others like YouTube and Flickr. As you would expect I had no trouble getting the stock accounts configured. When I created an account for my hosted Wordpress blog things weren’t quite as simple. I still can’t click anywhere in the accounts and services sidebar to launch my personal blog which seems to largely defeat the purpose of configuring it in the first place.

Now that the basics are set up I can take full advantage of the one stop shop display. The People sidebar gives you a unified feed of all your Facebook and Twitter friends with friendly shortcuts to send message or launch their profile page. You can also click on the Facebook or Twitter tabs for more control over each service. It would be nice to have access to all the contextual actions from the All people tab, hopefully we get that in a future release. For now it is one extra click *sigh*.

The Media Stream bar is a cool feature that gives you quick access to recently published photos from Facebook, Flickr and movies from YouTube. It also has the benefit of letting you know that you have never published any photos to your account - whoops!

The Feeds bar gives you quick access to your RSS feeds but it is no substitute for Google Reader. Flock is also intelligent about scanning sites you may be visiting and notifying you that feeds are available for subscription. It does the same with media streams and search engines, offering to add them to your Media Bar and Search Elsewhere engine list respectively.

Throw in a blog editor and a photo uploader and Flock rounds out a nice suite of tools in a slick little package. I will definitely have to take the time to get all my Firefox plugins working so I can give Flock a fare shake. For now I would grade it a solid “B”. It probably seems a little harsh but I am a creature of habit and will have to spend some time with Flock before I raise the ranking.