Flock – the social web broswer

I’ve had this browser downloaded for some time now, but I can’t seems to tear myself away from Firefox to use it. The concept, I think, is pretty great, though. Flock has developed a web browser based on social media and personalization, where you can sign into sites like Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, WordPress etc, right from the browser. It keeps you logged in and feeds updates from those sites to the “My World” home page. You can view media feeds from sites like Flickr and YouTube in the cool “media bar”, a viewer you can open that appears at the top of the browser. You can also add whatever feeds you want to its feed reader, favorite websites and use the web clipboard to save things like text and images you want to keep while you browse the web. Whenever you navigate to a site that has media or RSS capabilities, an orange button lights up next to the address bar that lets you subscribe to it automatically. You can also blog directly from the browser, since it is connected to your blogging platform of choice (WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, for example).

Being a seemingly great service, I still don’t understand why I haven’t taken to it yet. It might be that I’m too used to Firefox, or because I already have so many pages bookmarked on FF and so many feeds on Bloglines and I can’t seem to find a place to import them. Or maybe it’s that the browser feels a bit cluttered, and that bothers me. I also think that, although the browser is compatible with a number of social media sites, it’s still missing a lot of them (like social networking sites, for example, and others), so it is quite limited in that sense and may not be useful to a lot of people who don’t actually use the services that Flock is associated with. But I’ll try to use it more often, and keep you updated on future developments.

Has anyone tried this browser? What do you think of it?

UPDATE! 10/24/2007: Arun Rajagopal directed me to a very interesting blog that happens to have published this post about Flock the day before I published this one! We must be on some sort of Wonderland wavelength or something. Check it out!

UPDATE 2! 10/24/2007: I just discovered that Flock is now in version 1.0 Beta and has added a few features like the People Bar, which now includes Facebook and Twitter. My Facebook account through Flock doesn’t work perfectly yet (my Friends don’t appear in the sidebar), but this is a great step forward. I was also able to import my bookmarks from Firefox, which is great. Now I just have to figure out how to import my Bloglines feeds (I’ll probably have to add them manually!) and I’ll be all set.

UPDATE! 11/10/2007: Here is a great review and quick overview of features on the new Flock 1.0