I’ve just pulled down a copy of Flock, a new web browser based on Firefox that is supposed to make it easier to interact with the web, and I am testing it out now. In its efforts to provide access to “Web 2.0 applications”, it integrates blogging, Flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks, etc. I’ve been trying to capture some of this functionality in Firefox, with the Deepest Sender extension for Livejournal and by putting a del.icio.us bookmarklet in my “bookmark toolbar”, but Flock makes it all pretty and easy to use.
For instance, if I want to talk about how beautiful Philadelphia is, I can just open the Flickr “topbar” and drag one of my pictures from Philly into this Livejournal blog post. There are a few things that could be done to improve usability… for instance, if I want text to wrap around my picture, I have to right click the picture after I drag it into the blogging window, and change that option. Same thing if I want padding for the picture. There should be a way to change the default settings for pictures that you drag into a blog post. But that said, if this blog post goes through properly, I will be officially converted to Flock, even though this beta version freezes up completely when I try to edit my “Favorites” (i.e. my del.icio.us bookmarks) through Flock. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next version.
Mad props to my internet buddy/acquaintance Andy, who is fortunate enough to have a job at Flock. Excellent work, man!
Technorati Tags: Flock, testing
UPDATE: Well, Flock’s Livejournal support has room for improvement… when I made this post, it popped up an error message, but it seems to have posted anyway. I had to edit this post in Xjournal a bit to make it pretty, Flock left a lot of space at the top of the post for some reason. Also, clearly the “tags” supported by Flock are Technorati tags, not Livejournal tags, but that does lead to the question why Livejournal doesn’t integrate their tags with some 3rd-party tagging service… Finally, Flock doesn’t seem to let you post friends-only entries yet, which means that I can’t switch to Flock for my LJ client yet. Ah well. That’s beta software!
Coooooool.
Hey, I don’t know if you saw my follow-up post, but I officially recommend Scuttle over de.lirio.us for importing from del.irio.us ^_^ It also seems to import bookmarks from your browser, so you can’t go far wrong.