Flock has completely changed how I interact with the so-called Social Web.  In my case, that means Facebook and Flickr.  Ever since I first started using Flock and received the help I needed to get the blogging to work, I’ve been using it every day.  In fact, that only thing that has kept me from having it be my only/default browser is that it’s extremely slow in Flickr when loading pages.  Also, in any pages with videos (whether from Youtube or Vimeo) there is a video and audio stutter that renders the video unwatchable.  But that’s the only real negative I’ve been able to find with Flock.

When it comes to my social sites, Flock has really helped me out a lot!  Ever since I graduated from Cornell, I didn’t understand the point of logging into Facebook just to see if someone had updated their profile.  However, I didn’t want to get emails every time they updated their pages either.  That would just clog up my inbox when it might be a busy week where I don’t care if anything has changed.  Flock reaches the perfect compromise.  I just leave the Social Networks bar open as I surf.  If any of my contacts updates their profile or status, they appear at the top of the stack.  At a glance I can tell if anything’s been updated and I can decide whether or not to take a look.  Also, when people pop up, sometimes I find myself wondering, “What every happened to so-and-so” and I click on actions and I can send them a message or write on their wall.  It’s great!

Also very convenient are the icons which represent mail, pokes, friends, groups, and calendar items.  I can tell if I have items pending without having to navigate to Facebook and checking through all the areas I need to check.

Similarly, I have been a lot more involved flickr thanks to Flock.  Whenever someone comments on my photos or leaves me a message I can tell, even if I’m on another site at the time.  Also, I’m more likely to visit people’s photos when I can see who’s updated recently and have their items appear in the media bar.  Whereas before I was only clicking on my contacts’ photos because of thumbnails, now I just click on names of people who have updated recently and see many more of their shots in a row.  That’s how I came to see this photo, for example:

That’s a great photo and I may have not clicked on it otherwise.  But Flock isn’t the only one getting into this idea of aggregating your various social sites into one site.  A group of folks over at Red Hat have come up with Mugshot and, together with Gnome, the Online desktop.  I’m going to speak about those in my next post, but here’s a preview of what the mugshot site looks like:

The packages for Mugshot/Online Desktop are currently in the Fedora 8 repositories.  I’ve installed them and we’ll see just what you get out of it in my next post.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Flock, Social Web, Flickr, Facebook, Online Desktop, Fedora 8, Mugshot