Alright, so there’s a new web browser in town that’s been making a few waves lately. It’s the Flock web browser, and is supposed to be a “new and improved” way of surfing the web. It’s fully Web 2.0 compliant (get the upgrades if you didn’t get the memo) and basically take the web browser to the next level by making turning it into a social browsing experience.

Uhm, what is a “social browsing experience”? It’s hard to say exactly, and sounds more like a buzzword a marketing department would come up with… but one of it’s core features is that it will integrate your blog, photos, bookmarks, and whatever other online identities you have directly into the browser itself, giving you easy one-click access to your data. So for example, if you give Flock your Blogger username and password, you could drag a picture or snippet of text from the web page you’re currently viewing and drop it into a “blog it” toolbar and have it automatically appear as a post on your blog. So that’s kinda cool. This easy access in turns allows you to share your ideas more easily, thereby creating a social browsing experience. That’s the idea anyways. Here’s a quote that might be helpful:

Flock’s browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn’t satisfied passively browsing media online. Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online - BusinessWeek

I’ve used it for a couple days, and while it certainly is a very nice web browser (it’s based on Firefox), I’m kind of on the fence with Flock. Sure it lets you post entries to your blog without too much work, but the thing is, I can already post to my blog without too much more work. It’d probably save me a whole 30 seconds per post (the time it takes for me to navigate to my blog’s admin screen), but the main drawback for me is that I can’t edit the HTML source directly. I certainly appreciate the efforts and motivations behind it, but I don’t know if it is the New And Improved Web Browser they’re making it out to be.

I’m also not sure how there can be an entire company behind a web browser that’s given away for free. To me, it almost feels like the hype surrounding Flock is something more akin to the hype from the DotCom Boom in the 1990s. Lots of great and innovative ideas, but no real business plan to keep it sustainable. Maybe that’s being a little harsh, but I don’t think by much. Or perhaps their business plan is acquisition, which seems to be back in fashion these days (Flickr, Upcoming, Weblogs, MySpace, Latest-Google-Purchase, etc).

In anycase, go download Flock for yourself (especially if you have a blog), and give it a whirl or two. You might even like it. More opinions on Flock from around the blogosphere.

PS: You’re reading post #100! I would like to take this opportunity to thank the 5 people that actually read this site: my mom, my dad, me, my boss, and the random surfer from Asia who was actually looking for noodle recipes¹. Thanks for believing in me and for hitting the “Reload” button to keep the web stats numbers up.

¹ I made this up.