Flock Browser Adds New Social Media Features

The Flock browser is one of those things you either get right away or scratch your head and wonder why anyone would use it. It's not as visually clean as other browsers, but if you're steeped in social media or crazy about Flickr and YouTube then you'll love Flock the second you fire it up. It's also just the answer if you're tired of juggling dozens of apps, tabs, or windows to keep track of what's happening on Twitter and Facebook while watching a video of a cat playing piano and flipping through pictures of penguins.

The Flock browser was built with an eye toward social networking and its integrated social media tools have always been the biggest selling point for this browser. This new release tweaks those features, adds a few new ones, and makes it even easier to manage your online social life all in one spot.

In previous versions, Flock's integrated Twitter functionality was limited and messages were truncated. Now, users can see full tweets, reply, and click on links within Twitter messages. It's also easy to drag and drop images and links into your outgoing Tweets. Speaking of drag and drop, you can also use it to send files to your Facebook friends via the newly added Facebook Chat. Updating your status across multiple sites is a bit easier now thanks to the new FlockCast feature that lets users broadcast to Twitter and Facebook at the same time. 

Flock's My World page offers a place to corral your favorite feeds, visited Web sites, and friend activity, sorted into columns in one tabbed browser window. You can also assign saved Twitter searches their own columns, which is a really handy option if you like to follow specific topics or keywords.

Sending pictures to Flickr is a snap with Flock's built-in photo uploader -- just drag your images into its mediabar and send them on their way with one click.

Bloggers will love the built-in full-featured text editor that can be configured to manage multiple blogs.

Admittedly, Flock has so many features and functions that if you turned them all on at once, you just might go insane. These images show the difference between browsing with the social media tools off:

And on:

Fortunately, the browser is highly customizeable and works with virtually all plugins and extentions designed for Firefox.

There's a lot to like about this new version of Flock. If you're into social networking, then this is one broswer you'll defintely want to take for a out for a test drive.