This morning I felt like I wanted to try something new, so I installed Flock, the plugged-in, oh-so-social spin-off of the Firefox browser. Flock is basically the same as Firefox, but with integrated support for Flickr, Photobucket, del.icio.us, Shadows and most popular blogging software. Lotsa whiz-bang fancy shit going on.

After installing, I went through the setup and hooked Flock into my Flickr and del.icio.us accounts as well as this blog (typing that word makes me feel dirty… go figure). Currently, I’m typing this post using Flock’s built-in editor. I write the post, click publish and the post should go live, I guess, we’ll see.

So far, after less than thirty minutes of using Flock, I’m already annoyed with it. The rich-text editor sucks (but then again, so does the Wordpress rich editor). Incorrect and extra html tags are getting shoved in all over the place. So, now I’m continuing this post from the source editor, manually inserting my own formatting. No big deal, that’s how I write all my posts with Wordpress anyway.

Also, it seems that have two choices with the blog editor, publish live or save locally. I prefer to save as a draft within Wordpress since on any given day, I’m using three different computers and two operating systems. I’m typing this on a Mac and later in the day, I’ll be on Linux—what if I want to continue working on a draft? Sucky. Also, I have no way to upload images directly from the post editor. This I can do from Wordpress. I assume that Flock intends you to use it to upload images to Flickr or Photobucket and then link from there, but I don’t want to do that. Most of the time, I want to upload images to my site directly. This means I either have to manually ftp them or just go back to using the Wordpress post editor. This is really lame. The built-in spell-checker seems nice, but I just used it and now I find <span> tags surrounding everything that the dictionary questioned and I instructed it either add or ignore. Whole sentences are wrapped in some cases. What the fuck is up with that? Now I have to go through and manually remove them. I’m getting pissed. In fact, fuck this. I can’t deal. I’m copying this post and pasting into Wordpress. This is ridiculous.

So in my opinion, Flock’s blogging features suck huge, hairy ass. There’s no way I’d ever use it. It’s a hinderance rather than a convenience to me. So let’s move on to other features.

The photo upload feature is pretty nice looking, I can drag and drop, upload, tag, rotate and view photos in my Flickr account. However, the application I normally use, Kflickr, let’s me specify what set I want to upload to. To me, that’s necessary feature that saves me time from having to organize later. The Flickr Uploadr for OSX also has this feature. Because of this, I’ll never use Flock to add images to my Flickr account. Once again, it’s a hindrance rather than a convenience.

The integrated RSS reader is nice—rather similar to Sage, which I’ve used in the past with Firefox. I like how it presents the feeds and notifies you of new items. My only complaint is that I see nowhere to set the interval time to check for updates to feeds. In fact, it’s not really clear at all what timing it uses at all. Fifteen minutes? Half-hour? Hourly? No clue. Also, I see no clear-cut way to export my feeds, like an OPML file, should I decide to use a different application. Still, this is one feature with Flock that I like. Points awarded.

I really hate the social bookmarking set-up/integration Flock uses. I love del.icio.us, but Flock makes posting to it more of a chore than ever before. I spent way too long trying to figure out whether I was posting to my del.icio.us account or bookmarking locally and I find that using the del.icio.us extension for Firefox does the job much better, especially in respect to tagging. It’s getting repetitive, I know, but once again it’s more of a hindrance than a convenience.

One feature of Flock that I do actually enjoy is the toolbar riding the bottom of the browser, allowing me to drag and drop text and images for later use. I would definitely use this feature. It’s handy, easily accesible and looks pretty sleek. More points awarded.

Lastly, the overall performance of Flock is just sluggish. Firefox seems to run several times faster, be it on OSX or my Kubuntu desktop and laptop computers. I realize that Flock is still in beta testing and I will make sure to try it again once the final version is released, but as it stands now, I’ve no use for it. I’m much more excited for the release of Firefox 2.0, with it’s built-in spell-check on assorted other joys.

I get the point of Flock. It’s a good thing to want to bring all these social applications together into one browser, but it needs to be done right. Someone with little experience with the services Flock integrates might be really happy, but for me, someone who has used Flickr, del.icio.us and other services as well as running a blog for several years, Flock comes across as a fancy-looking pain in the ass.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 1:48 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.