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.

Silicon Alley Insider’s recent chart showing the amount of time spent on major sites displays a strong push for both Google and Facebook, while the previous (shocking) champ Yahoo is experiencing a steady overall drop.

Yahoo and AOL are in steep decline, while Microsoft is simply staying afloat, most likely bolstered by spending hundreds of millions on marketing their Bing search engine. Apple, which is rumored to be preparing for a more cloud-based approach, isn’t even on this list.

Facebook has really pulled up close with Google, but co-founder Sergey Brin recently said the company is unfazed by Facebook’s growth.

“The indications that we have show that when Internet users become Facebook users they actually do significantly more searches on Google,” Brin told Reuters in Sun Valley, Idaho last week.

But Google isn’t resting on their laurels in regards to competing with Facebook. That would explain this recent release of a huge 216 slide presentation by Google UX researcher Paul Adams on the problems and opportunities of social networking.

The developer channel of Chrome has been updated today and the geolocation API is now built in. This allows developers to now work on apps and extensions that can take into account a user’s geographic coordinates. I’m not sure specifically what type of applications would incorporate this feature, but I could imagine this bringing a new tool in terms of localized social networking that could be pretty useful.

To use the geolocation feature, you must have the Google Chrome developer channel release of Chrome (version 5.0.342.1) and you must run a commnad line switch of “–enable-geolocation” when executing the chrome.exe application.

The release notes referenced that you could test this by going to http://maps.google.com and it would recognize that the feature was turned on. However, I could not get it to work at that URL. Instead I found another link in the notes to go to http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/m which must be the UK URL for the mobile maps app. When I went to this site, I was prompted with this messgae in Chrome:

I clicked the “Allow” button, and up popped my location. If you have ever used the Google Maps application on your smartphone, it is exactly like that, with the major difference being that you computer has much more processing power with which to build some useful tools and games around.

This has to be done every time you start Chrome if want this experimental API to be turned on. There are probably going to be some interesting apps that will be developed for this, and it is clear that this is a move further towards mobile computing for Chromium. Having this on the browser is only a start for where this is going in an operating system architecture. With that being said, what kind of apps do you envision there being with the geolocation API?

As if comments on a post were not good enough, the reality is that Twitter is also an enormously important aspect of social media. With the Twitter Reactions Extension, you can see what people are opining about on a particular website – drilled down to a specific page. I could write a lot of words about this, but it is proabaly best if I just post a video on the topic:

Now, I could harp on the values of Twitter, and some wonder how they will ever be able to make money as business, but they are not going away. With extensions like Chromed Bird and now this, expect to see more utilizations of Twitter on the horizon for both Chrome browser, and eventually Chrome OS.

For those who have been overseas, you know that Asian countries thrive on SMS text messages. Believe it or not, 140 characters go a long way, and the advertising revenue can be significant. I would expect to see more developments in this spectre very soon. Twitter, in my esteemed opinion (and that’s not saying much) has a viable business.

So much so that they use Amazon’s Web Services to deal with the constant flow of traffic. Don’t think so? Look in the bottom of your browser the next time you’re checking out Tweets.