Flock Brings Organized Social Networking to the Browser
Posted on 24. Aug, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in News, Reviews
You’ve got your Facebook, you’ve got whatever you use to push out tweets. There’s Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon for crowdsourcing the news you want. These, amid countless other social networking sites, pose an interesting question.
Is the browser really built for the social web?
The company Flock doesn’t seem to think so. That’s why they have built a browser based on Chromium (formerly, they used Firefox) that takes into account all of the various social networking sites. Instead of having twelve tabs devoted to all these sites, Flock simplifies the whole deal.
That’s helpful since we’re already bombarded with information constantly; being able to keep things under control actually has proven to make people more productive. Fewer avenues to veer off of in the browser can help people stay more focused on the task at hand.
Using Flock, it has the same general UI as Chrome. It has its own design flair of course, but if you use Chrome it will seem intuitive. Flock also could use its own icon since right now they’re just using the Chromium one which can be a bit confusing.
The browser uses a sidebar feature to separate browsing from your social networking accounts, something that the Chromium team has eyes on implementing for Chrome in the future as it would be useful when Chrome OS launches.
It’s great to see the efforts of the Chromium team used for other browsers such as Flock that have very specific purposes in mind. The Comodo Dragon browser, for example, uses Chromium in an attempt to create the most secure browser experience available.
Here’s a post by Flock VP of engineering Clayton Stark that was posted on the Chromium Blog about their move from Mozilla-based code to Chromium.
