What the Flock? Flock is a “social web browser” designed to display the user’s social interaction for several different social media applications, like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc. Instead of flipping back and forth between browser tabs favorite social media apps, the user can take quick glances to see what’s going on in his/her online social world.

Upon installing Flock, I eagerly logged into all of my choice social apps to see how they would integrate into the browser. Twitter transitioned smoothly; however, the Flock/Twitter sidebar does not display the most recent posts nor does it order the posts chronologically. I would prefer to see a mirror image to the Twitter site; the tweets are hideously out of date. One sweet thing that the Flock/Twitter sidebar DOES do is “post a link” from the page that you are visiting on the browser side. By selecting “post a link,” the link is automatically inserted into your next tweet–no copy/pasting links into Twitter posts anymore.

Flickr seems to integrate nicely. The left sidebar has handy tools to upload new photos, while a top bar, or media stream, appears with a filmstrip of photos when “my media” is selected. I could get used to this.

Overall, the Flock browser is a great idea, especially for socialites and shutterbugs. I’ll probably remain a Firefox luddite for now since its web developer add-ons are so difficult to pry away from my W3C /508 fingers.