Day one using Flock, and I must admit, I'm coming away impressed so far. Flock's integration with various forms of social "web 2.0" functionality and awareness makes my Firefox implementation look pitiful. A messy mash of extensions and bookmarks that is nothing but clutter. Flock is clean and personalized to an alarming degree.

I'm actually posting this using the built-in blog tools. Yes, I can do this already with Firefox and the Performancing extension. But this is one element of the Flock implementation that creates a complete user experience. Not only am I blogging from the browser, but I have access to the photos I've loaded to my Flickr account, as well. And there's a nifty little "web snippets" tool built-in that allows you to snag bits of text or images from sites and store for later use, such as in blog posts. It's like Google Notebook.

I've never used del.icio.us before, and I must say that I prefer it now over Blinklist. It's cleaner, faster, and–it's integrated with Flock. Storing bookmarks to del.icio.us is a breeze, and they show up quickly in both the Flock browser favorites and the del.icio.us website. I'm a fan of that feature.

The RSS feed aggregator is nice, very similar to the experience you get at Bloglines. Since I like Bloglines, you can probably guess whether or not I like this built-in aggregator.

There's small annoyances, sure. Like how bookmarks can only be displayed horizontally within your bookmark toolbar. I like to store my bookmarks in folders and have them cascade down vertically from my toolbar. But there's a handy switcher tab at the end of the bar that lets you select what folder you want to see in the bookmark toolbar instantly. So, switching out from favorites is at the same time easy and annoying. Is that possible? I deem that it is.

We'll have to fix the part where I can't add tags to this post. That will be reported already, I'm sure. But I'll pop over to the Flock beta community in a bit just to make sure. UPDATE: once I hit the "publish" button, a list of all my categories appeared and allowed me to make selections prior to final uploading of the post. I kinda thought it would be a bit strange for the Flock team to entirely neglect the "tagging" option. It's pretty much a defining factor of web 2.0.

Overall, my day one experience is overwhelmingly positive. I'll be continuing to play with the features for a few days, and periodically updating my impressions here.

Blogged with Flock