The web, and the way people engage online, has evolved dramatically over the past decade. We still see a lot of room for the browser to keep pace with everything that’s going on on the web. Providing a fast, safe and simple browsing experience is very important, but at Flock we are also trying to look more broadly at how the web browser can enrich users’ online experience.

For this release, and for at least the next year or so, we are primarily focused on supporting the social dimension of the web, and on bringing information closer to the user. Right now this includes a heavy emphasis on the photo experience (from upload through discovery to notification), RSS support, dramatic improvements to the search box (including a new take on favorites), and blogging.

Casey over at MaisonBisson posted about Flock back in October when the Flock preview first came out (v0.1 or something). I saw Casey’s post and decided to give Flock a whirl. I was mildly impressed and saw that Flock had potential. Its big problems at the time were related to memory leaks and sluggishness. That seems to be resolved and they’ve done wonders to their ‘features.’

Social Bookmarks

Beautiful. Flock lets you use Del.icio.us or Shadows as your bookmarking tool. So anything you bookmark can be accessed from anywhere you go (whether through Flock or at the bookmarking site). Your bookmarks can be tagged right from the browser as well as marked as public or private.

Social Images

Flock integrates with Flickr and Photobucket and a sexy manner. The browser literally becomes an uploading/browsing agent for images. They’ve a nice drag and drop interface with a photo bar that you can place above your tabs. Check it out:

Its slick, intuitive and has many Flickr features (I can’t speak for Photobucket as I do not have an account there).

Text & Misc. Images

Another sexy aspect of Flock is the ability to highlight and drag text and images URLs from anywhere and store them for later. Once you’ve placed something in that Text and Image bar you can browse, drag and drop the data into the browser or external applications. In addition to the dragging and dropping of the data, you can simply right-click the data and select the blog option.

Blogging

Flock being a Web 2.0 browser (as its being toted), it cannot forget blogging. You can set your browser up to post to your blog (using a WYSIWYG editor). You can post to blogs hosted by: WordPress, TypePad, Moveable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Blogger. The blogging tool supports any blog that uses Moveable Type, Blogger, MetaWebLog, and Atom APIs. Snazzy tool, but I’m happy with the web-based editing of my blogs for now.

News

There’s a nice news aggregator as part of Flock. Looks decent…but I’ll stick to my own home-grown aggregator.

Searching

If you use the browser search tool, Flock goes a step further and as you type it’ll grab items from your history, favorites, and the top five searches from Yahoo!. Pretty sexy stuff. Be sure to add Blingo to your search list!

Extensions

Because Flock is based off of Firefox, many of the extension run for it! So you can still have the must haves. I definately wouldn’t be using Flock otherwise.

Summary

I like Flock for now. It looks promising, the features are nice and it looks pretty sexy too. Get it at Flock.com.

Ajax stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. Its an architectural methodology on the interactions between a number of different technologies in a way that provides a more seamless user experience between user-to-server communication.

There are tons of blogs and articles out there that rant and rave of its use as savvy site designers implement Ajax into their web applications, and rightly so. However, through my blog skipping and digg watching I have seen numerous complaints of “OMG, Ajax is stupid….its just a fad/buzzword/etc” or “Ajax is just overhyped, don’t know why people use it!!” I have a couple words that describe those people: cynical, ignorant and, well…squirrel handed. Wake up people. Ajax isn’t a fad, its an architectural change in the way that web applications function. A focus on application speed and uninterrupted user interaction.

What’s so great about it? Why do I pee my pants with glee every time I use a web app that makes use of the technology?

I’m a developer. I’ve been developing database driven web applications for a number of years now and have seen the clear line between a desktop application and a web application. Desktop applications are highly interactive and responsive to the user, where web apps (in the past), were fairly static locations (however dynamic the content) to provide information/entertainment to the user, where user interaction required page loads in order to store information to a database/write to a file.

Next came Flash, an excellent tool but tends to require a much more artistic flare and is much more time consuming with general maintenance than its worth.

The reason Ajax is so sexy is that it bridges the gap.

The average-Joe browser may not be aware when they stumble upon a site that makes good use of Ajax, but that average Joe can feel something right about it. To the avid browser, however, an Ajax site is more readily obvious; you can interact with elements on a page and save settings without reloading; pages are highly resposive to user input with minimal wait times.

Gmail and Google Maps were the applications that really brought Ajax into the limelight. (They weren’t the first, just the first major apps). The world saw what Google could do and followed suit. The world saw that it was good. The Ajax revolution was born. It has birthed a whole new breed and boom on the internet, bringing forward a multitude Ajax enabled sites and applications:

• MasterWish
• Flickr
• MSN Start
• Zimbra
• 24SevenOffice

And thats just the tip of the iceberg. I look forward to what will become of our expectations of web applications. You won’t see me sitting idle during this evolution. I will be innovating and participating all along the way.

While many people out there have used tagging in Flickr, Gmail, MasterWish and various other web 2.0 apps…there are still many out there that express their opinions on tagging as “Tagging…WTF is that?!”. Having a large web company such as Amazon with its HUGE following jump on the band wagon with tagging will help bring folksonomy to the masses.

While exciting that this is happening, Amazon is slowly rolling tags out to their users as evidenced in this excerpt of the CNet article:

The idea, apparently, is to slowly experiment with tags and to give users some power over how certain Amazon products–books, for example–are categorized.

For now [...] only about half of Amazon’s users can even see tags on the site.

Its only a matter of time before folksonomy will cease to be a buzz word and start appearing in the english dictionary. Everybody and their brother will know of tagging and the world will be a happier, easier to search place. I can only hope

My friend, Zach found this photo on Flickr. It has to be the best Dog Costume I’ve ever seen. The poor dog.