Flock

http://www.flock.com

Flock is a great new browser based on Firefox. It has some great features such as:

1.
The Star button

Out with bookmarks, in with Flock Favorites.

They're stored online, and they're shared, searchable, and tagged. Simply click the Star in the URL bar and you've flagged a page. You can easily retrieve it later. The Star turns orange (and is orange the next time you visit the page, to remind you that this is one of your favorites).

Example:
1. Go to del.icio.us and get an account if you don't have one. Then start Flock, visit a web page, and click the Star button. You're done. No need to herd your favorites into folders and manage them.
2. When you see the "Share your favorites online?" prompt, say yes, and enter your Delicious user name and password.
2.
Tagging

You can add tags to Favorites by simply clicking the little arrow next to the Star icon. Or, if you like to tag, Open the Flock menu, choose Preferences, and go to the Web Services section. Activate the "Clicking Star Performs Star and Tag" option. You can also bring up the tagging dialog by clicking CTRL-D (Windows).

Example:
1. Go to an interesting web site
2. Click the little arrow next to the Star, and select Star and Tag This Page. To add multiple tags, separate them with commas, the enter key, or quotes.
3.
Favorites Manager

The Favorites Manager is a simple way to organize and view your Favorites and a feed reader (see below).

Example:
1. Click the button with the three stars
2. You can organize Favorites into collections, or by tagging them. Use the tabs to switch between these two views
3. Click the + button in the lower left corner to create a new collection
4.
History Search

Flock comes with the open source Clucene search engine built in. Each time you visit a web page, it indexes all the content on that page so you can easily retrace your steps later. Pages you've starred as Favorites float to the top when you do a History Search. History Search is stored locally for privacy. For more privacy, you can wipe it out using the Clear Private Data command.

Example:
1. Visit some interesting web pages, such as Yahoo News.
2. Start typing a few letters of a search query (for example "tech") into the search box.
3. After you type a few queries, a menu appears showing you matching results from your browser history and pages you have starred. You can use the keyboard to navigate through the menu.
4. When you press Enter, a normal web query is done using the search engine you have chosen.
5.
Most Frequently Visited / Most Recently Added

Flock keeps track of which web pages you visit most frequently.

Example:
1. Use the browser for a few days.
2. Open the Favorites menu and choose Recent Favorites or Frequently Visited Sites.
6.
Multiple favorites toolbars

With Flock, you can have multiple Favorites toolbars and switch back and forth between them.

Example:
1. Create a few Collections in the Favorites Manager.
2. In the right corner of the Favorites toolbar, you'll see a flyout selector. Click it to choose a different Collection. Voila! Your choice becomes your current Favorites toolbar.

Feeds

7.
Feed discovery

Just like Firefox, Flock puts an icon in the URL bar when a site has one or more feeds. In Flock, you can click that icon to get an feed view of the page.

Example:
1. Go to the Flock home page.
2. Click the orange feed button in the URL bar.
8.
Feed caching

When you star a web page that has a feed, the feed is cached and updated every hour.

Example:
1. Go to the New York Times home page.
2. Click the Star button to mark that page as one of your Favorites.
3. Click the button with three stars to open the Favorites Manager.
4. Find the New York Times entry. You'll see a little expander icon next to that entry. Click that icon to see the feeds for that Favorite.
5. Click the feed icon to get the feed view.
9.
On the Fly Aggregation

Flock automatically creates an aggregated view for all of your collections. If you create a collection of news sites that you visit every day, you can see an aggregated view of all your news site on one page.

Example:
1. Create a new collection called News.
2. Add several of your favorite news sites that have feeds (nytimes.com, slashdot.org, news.com etc.).
3. Click the feed button next to your News collection in the Favorites Manager's sidebar. You'll see an aggregated page.

Blogging

10.

With Flock, blogging is a fully integrated part of the Web. Flock includes a blog editor that works with WordPress (and the new Wordpress.com hosted service), Movable Type and Typepad (and shortly also Live Journal) and Blogger. Other blogging platforms have not been tested.

Example:
1. Click the Blog icon (that looks like a feather pen).
2. Set up your blog account (you can manage your accounts, including setting up additional blog accounts, from the Blogs section in your Flock Preferences).
3. Create a simple blog post using our blog editor and click Publish.
11.
Blog This!

You can easily blog interesting web content with Flock, in just a few clicks.

Example:
1. Highlight a passage on a web page that you would like to blog about.
2. Right-click that selection and choose Blog This.
3. The blog editor opens with that selection already inserted. Not only that, the selection is properly formatted as a Blockquote and appropriate citation is included.

Other ways to Blog This:
1. Open the View menu and choose Topbars and then Blog Topbar.
2. Highlight a text passage and drag it to the box labeled "Drag stuff to blog it!"

Or you can use the Shelf (see The Shelf, below).
12.
Flickr topbar

With Flock, blogging Flickr pictures is easy. You can drag and drop pictures from our integrated Flickr topbar right into your blog post.

Example:
1. Click the Blog Editor button (that looks like a feather pen).
2. Click the Topbar icon and select the Flickr topbar.
3. Type your Flickr user name and click Get Photos.
4. Drag your pictures into your blog post.
13.
The Shelf

The Shelf is a scrapbook for interesting web content that you want to blog about later.

Example:
1. Open the Tools menu and choose Shelf.
2. Drag interesting URLs, pictures or text snippets from any web page onto the shelf.
3. Click the Blog Editor icon (that looks like a feather pen).
4. Drag items from the Shelf into your blog post