I'm trying out Flock (a 'social web browser') following a recommendation from Martin Polley as a way of integrating ma.gnolia bookmarking into the browser. My timing was poor, because there's a problem at the moment with posting bookmarks to ma.gnolia from Flock because of a temporary problem at ma.gnolia's end. However, I tried it out with de.icio.us, and it was a pretty seamless process.

I'm not quite sure what to make of Flock. Martin said that it's a kind of love it or hate it thing, and I can see what he means. If you use a lot of social software (flickr, social bookmark sites, facebook and so on), the integration features are pretty good. You can even blog direct from Flock, which is what I'm doing right now (all being well...). I also like the Web Clipboard, which lets you drag on links, text and images, then drag them on to other services or into a blog post. I can see that if you use Flock for everything, it's really handy to collect everything in one place for easy posting.

But.

The interface isn't bad, but it's pretty cluttered after you've been used to the minimalism of Safari. It also seems slower to render pages, and seems to like popping up endless warnings about popups, available feeds and so on. I also wish that there was a way to view my Google Reader feeds in the Feed sidebar -- you can use the button on the navigation bar to save feeds to Google Reader, but there's no built-in way to view them.

I'm going to play around a bit more with it, but I suspect that I'll probably go back to using Safari, Cocoalicious and MarsEdit for posting to my blog.

Blogged with Flock