The Flock Developer Preview is now available.

Well, as a starting point, and with only a little bit of playtime, I think Flock in pretty darned cool!  Not a Firefox killer, yet, but I could see how it might become so, especially if more “social” capabilities are added to it as development continues.

My 5 favorite things about Flock (so far)

• Blogability: Flock makes blogging pretty much effortless, at least from the interface side (now if I could just get that writing thing down).  Even my wife could figure out how to get Flock to integrate with any blogging software that Flock supports.  All you need to do is to point it at your blog URL and Flock figures out the API to use and the address of the file.  You enter your password, Flock makes sure you can log in and figures out the blog title and sets up the dialog so you can blog from the browser.  Heck, even on my MovableType url, where there are three blogs resident, Flock figured all thee of them out.  Of course I haven’t posted yet, so we’ll see how that goes.
• del.icio.us integration: some might remember a while back when I was so proud of the hack I came up with the display your del.icio.us tags in a Firefox sidebar.  Well, Flock does it natively.  And items that you save to favorites (or that you “star” in Flockspeak) can be automagically posted to del.icio.us.  Cool.
• style, style, style: The browser is very nicely styled.  Simple and elegant.  Easy on the eyes.
• The Shelf: A very nice little bitty that acts kind of like a web clipboard.  No, scratch that, pretty much xactly like a web clipboard.  Except prettier.  And drag-and-drop.  Like this:

  

  That’s the current ClustrMap from elliptical . . . just dragged from the page onto the shelf and then from the shelf onto the blog post.  Cool.

• Open Source: Need I say more?  OK, how about “you get to play, too” or “free as in speech” or, well that’s probably enough.

My 13 least favorite things about Flock (thus far):

• this list will have to wait.  Not that I haven’t found a few, just not 13 yet.

Anyway, if you’re interested in trying out a new, “social” browser, go get Flocked.  And take it easy on these folks.  This is pre-beta, after all, so expect to have a few problems and no one’ll get hurt.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 at 12:11 am and is filed under Blogging, The 'Net, development, flock, technology and has the Technorati tags Flock.
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