Overall, I like Flock. It’s a good browser, and so far, it’s been better to me than Firefox 2. The media bar is an amazing concept that was implemented very well. And the media uploading function works great. Flock is smooth and reliable, and I’m loving the experience, even without most of my add-ons. But it still has its nagging problems.

The integrated blog posting mechanism is broken, for one. Anytime I’ve tried to use it to post to this WordPress blog, it hangs, and then somehow ends up posting twice. It has done it three times now. It’s frustrating, but not a deal-breaker. What really gets me is the extent to which the Flock team simply doesn’t understand Twitter.

When I first input my social networking logins into Flock, I was prepared for an awesome experience since the social aspect has been touted as the cornerstone of the Flock build. It’s so far been extremely ‘meh’. The implementation of the People sidebar was very poorly designed. For instance, Twitter – as most people know – is a conversation system. But Flock turns it into nothing more than a friend system. When I open the Twitter tab in the People sidebar, I get a list of my friends, arranged in order of their most recent tweet. So, when I open Flock in the morning, I can only see the most recent part of each of my friends’ conversations. I can’t see the ten to twenty tweets any of them had made previously. It isn’t a stream of the conversation at all. It’s some weird amalgam of friends’ list and conversation placard, and it doesn’t necessarily work right in either regard. It’s highly frustrating, because I can see how it should work, but it simply doesn’t do that.

I still like Flock, it’s better at most things than Firefox 2 was. If Firefox 3 can take care of its nasty memory management, maybe I’ll end up moving over there. But for now, Flock meets most of my essential needs.

But does anyone else find it really disturbing that the so-called “social browser” just doesn’t understand Twitter? You would think it would be obvious.