Last night I tried out Flock, a new Mozilla-based browser that’s getting a ton of buzz.
The press is chiming in here too. Originally just a handful of people were invited to try Flock, which is in developer preview. Unfortunately, Flock installers quickly spread around town and the company released it out to everyone to try.
On the whole, I like the concept of Flock. It’s a social browser. Your bookmarks, instead of being housed on your PC, are stored online at del.icio.us. You can also add tags to your bookmarks. And last but not least, the browser also features integrated RSS reading and blogging. You can try it here. Oh and if you don’t have a blog, they will give you a WordPress weblog.
Unfortunately, the product really isn’t ready for prime time use. (WordPress.com isn’t either from what I saw, but that’s another matter.) Flock is horribly slow – at least on OS X – and worse, the feature set is really really confusing. Firefox, even when it was a 0.x release, was ten times more mature. Maybe that’s why it hit 100M downloads – it works! Like Om, for now I am scratching my head over Flock. My suggestion is to keep it simple, guys. Give me something that makes my life easier, not harder. So thumbs down for now, but I will give it another look when you ship.
Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.
He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.
