Flock is alot of fun for the first day or 2, then its annoying failures begging to grow more apparent. failures such as yahoo cock permanently inserted in source code. i swear to christ there is no way to dislodge its love for yahoo with a hex editor and years of free time, every time i make a typo yahoo pops up. its likley the same way people who despise Google feel about firefox, but then those people would likely enjoy flock not only for its yahoo affiliation but also for the child like interface, lack of add blocking and fisher price-esque menus. its entirely incompatible with any Firefox plugins that are worth a damn, however you can have your Facebook friends and statuses lined up on your left side, just incase you get the impulse to message jane to play the newest yahoo game abortion. (ok im done with my anti-yahoo rantings)
its integration with flickr (surprise) is done rather well its very convent to be able to click and drag images up to a convent bar to upload them to my flickr page. the idea of pulling a media stream form a website was very well done, theres not much i can say bad about that. however if i wanted 40% of my browser taken up by media streams and search options id switch to IE and let my users install plugins for a day.
One of the components i was most looking forward to is the RSS integration, which on the surface was done very well. that is its easy to add and detect RSS feeds on sites, one click add options, easy to organize. but if you try to read your feeds you’ll bleed from the eyes if you are used to the convince and intuitive design of google reader. piss-poor is a compliment to their reader. it crashed twice when i first attemted to import my OPML file with all my feeds so i ended up having to manually add my 50 something feeds, then the auto reed detecting feature assumed i read every other post of every other feed… very odd.
The only thing they came close to hitting the nail on the head with was the web clipboard. which i could see as being very usefull if you only use one computer all the time. if you travl between computers, dont even try.
Overall flock is a disappointment. ways they can improve: if im going to install a whole new browser i dont want the same one ive already got with a new coat of paint and features removed. its like they took firefox, broke its legs, and put it in a suit and called it new. a portable online user account would be good. less yahoo trash everywhere, a better rss reader, more stability would be awesome. integration with Facebook is a +. what would really make this better is if google bought it and incorporated all of its web based apps into it. i can dream right? this will be my last time using flock, but id like to hear what you think of it. later
Blogged with Flock
