The Eye

I’ve installed Flock on one of my computers. I am finding it really useful for Social Media use.

The sidebar which I can display or hide with one click is great for seeing who’s updated on services such as Twitter, Dig, Flickr, YouTube, Pownce, and Facebook. If I choose the feed option instead, I can read any number of RSS feeds, and in my opinion, I like the display option better than Google Reader, although, the latter is still my main feedreader of choice with all the extra options such as sharing that GR has.

If I click on the Mail envelope I can go straight to my email. I only use webmail these days – I have Gmail set up like a pop3 client.  I liek having my mail up in the cloud. No more synching nonsense, and no more muttering because the email I want is on the computer at home or in the office, or whereever else I happen NOT to be at the time.

I can also add Yahoo Mail and AOL mail if I wish. I can also use the sidebar to see my Favorites, and my History. The Accounts and Services section is one of my reasons for using Flock. I can set up several Social Media networks in here, and then a single click on them will take me, already logged in, to the relevant site.

There is also a blog editor, from where I can post directly to the blogs of my choice, and a photo uploader which I can use for Facebook, Flickr and Picassa.

Once any of the above options have been set up, it’s mostly one or two clicks to get to where you want to be.

The media bar is another cool option that can also be displayed or hidden, and you can look at media from various services. One great feature of that is you can share items from the media bar by dragging them down to people that are displayed in the sidebar in the People option. Hovering over an image opens it as a larger drop down, and a double click takes you to the web page where the image is hosted.

There are a number of useful icons and indicators in the address bar. One lights up when there is a media stream in the web page you’re on (which means you can display the contents in the media bar instead of opening the page; another lights up if a feed is present in the page; and another when an installable search engine is present.

There is also an option to directly send a link in the address bar, via email, using your chosen client.

I am using Flock Beta 2, which is based on Firefox 3. This means I can run most of the Firefox 3 plugins, to give even more flexibility.

Web browsers, while not exactly replacing the OS, are certainly moving towards becoming the desktop interface, particularly for people like me, who have their head in the clouds much of the day.