Review: Flock the Social Browser.

I have made no secret in the past that I love using Flock the social browser. I have used it for a good many years, but in its former incarnation when it used Firefox as its base, it did tend to be rather slow and cumbersome.  Yesterday the latest version of Flock, now based on Chrome, was released. . In this post, I intend to explain why using Flock in order  update all of my social feeds makes my life so much more convenient to be able to not only see all of your twitter/Facebook, RSS feeds, YouTube and Flickr updates in the sidebar, but also be able to instantly access any links, reply or tweet yourself with just one click.

 

Obviously if you are not a big user of social sites such as Twitter or Facebook etc, then Flock may not seem to appealing.

After downloading and installing Flock you are required to set up a Flock account. This is simply to enable Flock to access and remember all of your social site accounts. Once you  have set up a Flock account, then you can also set up any of your social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr or LinkedIn.

As you enable each of your social networks in Flock, the progress bar will show you how far you have gone or you can click on Done at any time.

Once completed, you can access all of your Social Networks updates in the handy sidebar on the right hand side. Once you have worked your way through these updates you can dismiss the sidebar from view by clicking on the icon at the far right hand side of the Address/Search bar.

You can scroll down your updates in the sidebar by using the wheel on your mouse. The sidebar normally scrolls back to at least 10 hours worth of tweet updates for me personally, so I can do lot’s of catching up!  Clicking on a link that someone has tweeted about, takes you to that web page. You can then easily retweet that webpage yourself in two ways. You can add your own tweet by clicking on the top icon in the Sidebar itself, adding your own comment and then click on the link (chain) icon under the update window. Flock will automatically shorten the URL address.

Alternatively if you see a Webpage, or some news you can also update to both Twitter and Facebook or just one of them by clicking on the icon just to the left of the Address/Search bar in Flock. Again, Flock will automatically shorten the URL for you.

You can also fully interact with your Facebook updates in the sidebar. Simply hover over the update, a small green arrow will appear on the right hand side, click on that and then you can and then you can comment, send a message, write on that persons wall, Poke them or post a Like to their update. When clicking on a Twitter update in the same way, you can Reply to or Retweet their update.

On the Flock Homepage you also have some very useful tabs available in the Flock bar namely Favourites, Groups and Explore. You can also access your Flock profile from here as well. Your Favourite sites are listed in a very useful page (or pages) for you to sort, read or delete as you wish. You can add them to your Flock profile page as well as sort them by Date or Title.

Groups allows you to Group each of your social friends according to how you wish. You can view your friends as All Friends and Feeds, Just Friends, YouTube Friends, Flickr Friends etc, and also create your own Groups of social friends such as Family or by some other criteria such as Business Associates for example. All are presented on the Groups page as small Cards complete with the person’s Avatar. You can add anyone to a new list simply by clicking and dragging their card over to that list.

Flock makes in super easy for me to keep in touch with every one of my friends in those Social Networks I use the most. Of course not every social network is available in Flock at this time, but for me the most important feature of Flock is what a time saver it can be when you wish to keep in touch with all of your friends and add any updates your social networks.

TG

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