shinylib

Although I have been really against trying Flock, for no reason at all, I finally gave in to some advertisement this morning and against my better judgment, I “clicked here” to download.

I am posting this with the WP function of the Flock browser. So far it is fairly easy. I click on the feather icon, which I have already figured out is the blog button, and a window pops up. Since I already found the setup function I should be autologged in… we’ll see.

Assuming everything posts according to plan, I am fairly pleased with the post features. There are nice WYSIWYG options for those who need them as well as “source” and “preview” options. I think source is like the raw edit view.

I am guessing there is drag and drop file activity, let’s find out. So I opened an explorer window and dragged in a photo file. Flock attempts to use a service it knows I am associated with and so offers to upload the file via Facebook. Since I don’t really want to upload the file through Facebook, I’m going to go back and try to configure flickr via Flock and see if that now becomes an upload option. As soon as I go to flickr a banner appears at the top of the Flock window letting me know that I can click remember account to add my flickr account to a Flock sidebar. Very cool. Now back to the drag and drop.

Sweet. I easily upload the file to flickr and tag it and set my privacy settings. The file appears right in the blog editing window and by right-clicking I get options for image placement, alt text, etc. Not too shabby.

In reading the Flock extensions page I see that many Firefox add-ons should work in Flock and they encourage you to test your favorites to find out. Apparently you will get a pop-up message letting you know if there is a compatibility issue with the add-on.

I’m not sure that I am ready to give up Firefox, personally, but I can really see how a lot of people may make the move to Flock. I think at the heart of it all, as I’ve said before, I’m no twopointopian. There are certain things I find useful about social networking and its software, but I don’t feel the need to be plugged in and visible all the time. I can live just fine without seeing my friends’ Facebook statuses at all times.

I don’t even want to get into what kind of commentary it is on my life that I have a web browser open at pretty much all times.

The kind of browser that would really appeal to me would revolve around research, not social networking.