The gradual appeal of the social browser
Like many who follow such things I’m test-driving the new Flock browser, the first “social browser” that integrates Web browsing, blogging, social bookmarks and photo-sharing. The buzz has been big around this project, not least due to its catchy name and their infectious sense of style, so it’s not surprising to me that the slashdot crowd has torn into the developer’s beta with a vengeance. As ever, it’s easy to be a critic.
What’s more interesting to me is my own response to the product. At first I was distinctly underwhelmed. After all, it a developer preview and doesn’t do much to frame the context of the product. It feels at first like Firefox preconfigured with a few extensions.
Even the process of hooking into my del.icio.us account was more confusing than it needed to be–it was unclear where exactly I needed to enter my account info to get Flock to import the bookmarks. So far I haven’t used the tag browser piece much, but it seems to work well. I’d love to see more novel ways of traversing tags than a straight list, but I’m willing to be patient.
So the initial experience fell a little flat for me. However, once I added my blog and flickr account info, then I began to get the promise of social browsing. If I come to a piece of content while surfing, I can drag and drop an excerpt into the shelf, find a flickr photo to match in the flickr topbar and then pull it all into the post editor in a wyswig way. The excerpt is even formatted with citation tags. Presto, the conversational Web is made much more fluid and intuitive. They even have a little tag box on the post editor for easy metadata creation.
So now I wouldn’t be surprised if this shifts my whole online experience.
Technorati Tags: vander wal, jonathan grubb, folksonomy, social software