Flock 2.0 (Mac & PC) is not only a web browser but it is optimized for your social needs. You can pack all your social services into the browser’s sidebar also known as the “Friend Activity Widget”, tracking them every second while you browse.

RSS feeds are also browsable through the sidebar just by switching tabs.

Social Networking

Social and other services supported by Flock includes MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Digg, Pownce, Delicious, Gmail, YouTube, Wordpress, Photobucket, Blogger, Yahoo Mail, Magnolia, Blogsome, Livejournal, Xanga, Typepad, AOL mail, Picasa and Piczo.

Adding Facebook to the Friend Activity Widget for instance, will enable you to track your Facebook friend’s updates.

Tracking your friend’s updates couldn’t be easier, think of it as a great way to keep your friends close to you at all times.

One of the perks of this concept is the ease in which you share content with your friends, eg. to share a link, image or video that you’ve found while surfing, just drag and drop the media or link into your friends on the left.

Blogging

Not only can you track your friend’s updates and all your RSS feeds (which you can sort them into different folders) on the left side bar, you can also post blog entries using the browser itself, no I don’t mean visiting the blogging site to post entries, Flock features it’s own dedicated blogging editor for your blogging needs.

Posting pictures can also be done via a dedicated photo upload interface, just drag and drop!

Browsing media

Browing photos and videos with Flock is one of the best experience I’ve seen. Just click on the media icon on the sidebar and you’ll be able to search for Flickr photos at the top of the browser. Thumbnails are layed out neatly in a horizontal format, Flickr page will be fetched upon clicking. If you’re a heavy “Flickr searcher” this browser is it!

You can also search Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa, YouTube, just to name a few. Very neat and useful integration.

My World

To view all your friend’s updates, RSS feeds, your favourite media (photos & videos) all at once, just click the My World icon on the sidebar. The fastest way to get an all round update of what you’re interested in.

My experience using Flock 2.0

Flock is a promising web browser if you’re a social networking addict. Having Facebook, Twitter and Flickr etc on the sidebar enabling me to check updates in real time is more than I can ask for.

Not mentioning being able to access Delicious bookmarks on the sidebar and dragging links into my Delicious folders directly, which is a plus.

The downside of the browser is that I can’t seem to click on any links on the sidebar that my friends posted, be it Facebook or Twitter. There is also no way to post new tweets or Facebook statuses right from the sidebar itself.

New updates does not invoke Growl notifications unlike Eventbox, though this might not be an issue for some people.

Finally, the browser seems to keep crashing frequently which I suspect is a result of bloating up the browser with too many RSS feeds. That might not be the cause of the crashes but whatever cause it is, it wasn’t a good experience for me at all.

Nevertheless, keep in mind that this issue might just be a one off, and I am sure the developers are still working hard on stabilizing Flock.

A great app in general, Try it for yourself!

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So you use many social services and you visit each site frequently to check for updates? If so, you might end up wasting too much time keeping up with all your online social life.

Eventbox, from The Cosmic Machine solves this problem by packing all your social services into one box!
So now you can track, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Pownce, your RSS, Reddit all in a single app.

What I love about the app is that it actually fetches new updates for you, not the other way round. Eventbox works with Growl notifications, notifying you of new updates to any social services, so you don’t have to visit the social sites for updates yourself. This not only saves you time, it also gives you up to the minute updates.

If you use lots of social services, would like to spend less time on them while still keeping ahead of them, have US$20 US$15 spare change, this is the app for you.

*Update (14 Nov 08): Price has been slashed to US$15 as the app is still in beta. Existing users of the app will get a refund of US$5 which may take about 3-5 days to take effect.

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool: