21st Oct
2005

I've been playing around with the recent developer release of Flock: the new 'social' browser. An interesting idea, its ideology shifts towards a more shared environment: sharing bookmarks via del.icio.us, integrated RSS reading (ties in with Favourites) and interface elements to allow quick blog article creation.

1. Social Bookmarking

Personally, I'm not convinced by the whole social bookmark thing, although I do like the idea of shared bookmarks for my own benefit: I regularly use both my desktop PC and my laptop, and sharing/syncing data between them is still a ball-ache at the best of times. I've tried manually copying files back and to, MozBackup, BookmarkBridge (which all rely on me manually pressing something), and even the wonderful SyncBack from 2BrightSparks, which can schedule the backup or synchronisation of any number of files and folder between machines.

Of course, on-line bookmarks solves this problem straight away. Provided the machine I'm on has Flock installed, I can access all my bookmarks from any machine. But now, of course, we enter the realm of paranoia: what if del.icio.us goes down? How does del.icio.us use this information? Will I never be able to have a pr0n bookmark folder ever again?

Of course, social bookmarking works two ways: I can visit del.icio.us and browse tagged bookmarks submitted by other members. If the guys at Flock can harness this within the browser - perhaps as some form of daily recommended or popular links by category - then the integration with del.icio.us could prove far more useful.

2. Blogging

Flock contains integration for blogs, allowing you to submit or edit your blog posts providing your blog/site software supports this functionality via XML-RPC. Blogger, MovableType and the MetaWeblog API standard are currently supported.

Dries recently committed a fix to allow Drupal's own blogapi module to get it working with Flock. Unfortunately, I still haven't managed to get it working. I'm not sure how useful this really is, but I'm sure it'll make some avid blogger-types happy.

3. A Better Search Bar

One thing I do love about Flock is the search bar. It looks the same as the usual Firefox search box, but hides a new idea. One that, once you think about it, should have been done a long, long time ago. The search box takes your input as you type, and performs an on-the-fly search of both your Favourites and your History.

With 'normal' bookmarks categorisable-by-folder gone, finding the site you're after will take a bit of getting used to in Flock. Collections provide an equivalent functionality to folders, but its the new search bar that I found most useful when digging out bookmarked or recently visited sites. Its a vast improvement on the current methods of browsing by History too, a feature that in all other browsers is a cumbersome and often unrewarding process.

This search functionality doesn't rely on shared bookmarks, let alone del.icio.us, so why hasn't this been considered for Firefox? Apparently, there's an extension that does something similar, and I think its a great feature.

4. RSS Integration

Lovely. An aggregator that finally fits into the browser properly. By categorising your favourites into collections, you can view all the recent RSS feed items for the entire collection via the Favourites Manager.

So all in all, Flock is an interesting idea and one that, even if it doesn't (and probably won't) replace my main browser (currently Firefox), I'll be keeping an eye on its progess.