Social Networking in Firefox

Michael Arrington has a post today at TechCrunch on how Mozilla is integrating social networking into Firefox and how it is bad news for Flock. Being a die hard fan of Flock, this raised some concerns for me. However, looking at the new Coop product, I think that it misses the mark for the average Flock user. The Coop creates a sidebar of your friends and shows any new content that they have posted or even pushed to you. This is perfect for people who use social networks but cannot be bothered with visiting all of their pages to check on a few friends. This keeps front and center so you are always up-to-date. Flock on the other hand offers features for what are essentially power usersw of the internet. To be honest, I never understood why they positioned themselves as a social browser as no one I know who uses it plays in social networks all that much. If it was their goal to create a social browser and they had not yet included a feature like the Coop then they have sorely missed their mark. What the have done is create a great meta tool for the internet. The killer features are the bookmark storage on del.icio.us, Flickr and Photobucket integration, and quick commands for uploading images and creating a blog post (I still cannot bring myself to use a browser based RSS reader and the Flock version pales next to Safari’s). None of these seem to be tied into the Coop and I would be curious to see how they work outside of there. All told, I don’t know that the Coop will be all that much of a threat to Flock, but a nice fork for those who really can’t get enough social networking in their lives. It will be interesting to see who the first will be to integrate Twitter in, as this seems to have a place in both.

Since this is the first time, I have touched on Flock since my more in-depth review, it might not be a bad time to touch on some improvements. Most seem to be in terms of overall performance, where I have seen much more stability and speed. They have added new photo capabilities like new sizes, private photo alerts, tagging of streams, etc. There still seems to be some problem with maintaining authentication as I consistently haver to re-sign-in to Flickr to access my photos. Also, del.icio.us bookmarks are somewhat delayed in appearing on the site. I still use the blog feature and use it pretty much all the time, I would love to see some Tumblr and Vox integration as well, so that posting to these is just as easy. I would also like to be able to pull out just the flat url for the flickr image as opposed to the full one offered by Flock. All told, Flock has cured me of my multiple-browser syndrome and made me a more efficient webizen, which makes me happy. I certainly hope that they survive “threats” like these and continue to add more features.

technorati tags:Flock, Firefox, TechCrunch, The Coop, Social Networking

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