I have a new social media friend and no, I’m not talking about the tons of random friends requests you get on a daily basis. I’m talking about a piece of social networking software that can help you get your arms around the online social scene. I’m talking about Flock, the web browser that’s based off the Mozilla project.
I know what your thinking. Who needs ANOTHER browser when FireFox 3.0 has just been released? I think FireFox has made some great improvements, but they are improvements to an old model of consuming the Internet. Browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer have come to power as part of the Internet land rush where the primary goal of the online website visitor was to “browse” sites looking for things to consume like text and images. But the online landscape has grown to include audio, video, and social networks. So it makes sense to have a browser that understands how to handle these additional part of the online experience.
According to the Flock website, “When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.”
As a social browser Flock helps you pull together most of the more popular social networks into one common dashboard.
For example, using Flock I can see all my friends from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all in one sidebar. Different networks are listed under their own tabs and all the networks can be crunched down into one tab that create a single activity stream or view.
The icon of each person in my people stream has a network badge to tell me what network they are on.
A great feature of Flock is the media stream. As I select a friend in my people sidebar, I can see all the available media for that person. I instantly see their pictures, videos, and other media options. From there I can leave comments on that piece of content.
The benefit here is speed. I am just a few clicks from the networks I use and I can move between social networks and still maintain one common user experience.
Flock also helps you extract content on a page that might overlook. For example, if you load a page in Flock that has an RSS feed, Flock will ask if you want to add it to your feed sidebar.
Again, the important point here is speed. You are not wasting time looking for feed addresses when subscribing to content. You can even add additional social networks and useful links to your favorites which can show up as a sidebar to give you one click access to your most common online resources. I use mine to get to Picasa, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Gmail.
Even though Firefox has a ton of addons that I use, I still find myself using Flock all the time now. It’s obvious to me that this is the next generation browser. Social media is here to stay and Flock offers a real solution managing the social networks.
Months ago I overlooked Flock as just another me-too browser in a noisy browser market, but today I understand that it’s a social networking tool that should be in the social toolbox of every online marketer and social butterfly. It’s the best kept secret that wont stay that way for long.
Enjoy,
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
