layout: post title: Flock 1.1 beta tire kicking created: 1203931657 categories:

• Clayton Stark
• feedback
• flock
• Mark Lise
• flockfeedback
• Open Source
• Web 2.0

Flock’s 1.1 Beta Has Arrived! And so I'm testing it (the last time was August 2005). I met my first semi-local Flock'er (Mark Lise) at the last DemoCampVancouver. They came back in force from Victoria to storm the Northern Voice conference (Flock was a sponsor).

At left, that's me watching Clayton Stark, the VP of Engineering, giving Marc Canter a demo, while myself, Rob Scales, and Dickt Hardt look on. Initial impressions (on my desktop PowerMac G5)

• Nice job on integrating Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and del.icio.us
• Oh, wait, I can set status message/tweet/whatever in the same predictable place??! Oh, um, please just build MoodBlast functionality in directly...and integrate Jaiku, of course
• delicious has links sorted by tag...my usage is most often by reverse chrono...can I toggle between a tag view and a recently added bookmarks?
• I added this Drupal aka Self hosted blog, but it seems I can't set the label of the blog (my username is the same on most sites, so a label like "bmann: blog" that is returned by auto discovery isn't going to help)
• The media bar mini-bar at the top for searching and browsing Flickr, and for drag/dropping into this blog editor, RAWKS!
• Yeah, I like the blog editor
• Some loads seem a little slow...but really, everything on my ancient, low memory PMac are slow...media bar and other stuff are saving me time
• OK, I'm now doing three blog posts at the same time...I don't think I can let go of this
• One more feature request: if I hit the "add link" button in the editor, and I've got a URL in my clipboard, please auto-fill it...kthxbye

If you hadn't heard of Flock the first time around, try it as a replacement (yep, replacement...) for Firefox. If you had gripes/crashes/etc. the first time, erase those memories and know that Canadian engineers are on the job and you should give it another try. With Firefox, you can add a bazillion plugins and do lots of functionality. Flock has it all integrated and smoothed out for lots of the social media services that people use already. Firefox is to Flock, as Drupal is to WordPress?

Works for Mac, Linux, and Windows. Anyone else using it again / for the first time? I have some ideas of other things it COULD do, what do you think?

(slight snafu in posting, but blog posts got autosaved / recovered. yay!)

Disclaimer: my company may end up doing some work with Flock. Of course, we also just helped Spread Firefox recently