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I’m writing this post from my new browser. It’s called Flock, the Eco version and it’s the bee’s knees as far as I’m concerned. I’m not the only one singing its praises. It’s on Alltop Green and several bloggers have posted about it since it appeared. Why do I like it so much?
First of all, it brings together so many things that I use and makes them even more accessible than my google homepage did. Secondly, it has pre-loaded green content, which is very handy for someone who blogs about environmental topics a few times a week. And third, but maybe most important from an eco viewpoint, at the end of the year, Flock’s owners will donate a tenth of the proceeds from Flock searches to an environmental cause to be determined by Flock users. That rocks!
I love that I can click on a little blue feather icon, write a blog post and then choose the blog to post it to, all from my browser. It even lets me blog to my self-hosted Wordpress blogs, which isn’t something I’ve found in other “blog from your browser” programs. In my role of researcher – one of the other hats I wear as a freelancer – I can right-click on an article and then click on “blog this” and Flock will copy it to whichever blog I choose, so that I can quote parts of it or use it in research later. That is a real time saver compared to copying things to the clipboard, laboriously cutting the parts out that I don’t want and pasting the quoted parts to a blog.
When I’m on a site, Flock has an icon that glows orange when it detects an RSS feed. All I have to do is click on it and I can instantly add the feed to my feed sidebar, where I can organize feeds in folders, another time-saver for a researcher/writer. Now, when I look for green news items, I just open my feed window and find out what’s happening in the environmental news instead of schlepping all over the Net to find out what’s going on.
Flock is built on the Mozilla/Firefox browser chassis, which is my browser of choice, so it has privacy and security built in. The only add-on I’ve installed so far is Key Scrambler, which is just what it says. It scrambles your keystrokes at the kernel level to deter keyloggers from stealing your passwords. It works seamlessly and doesn’t slow down Flock at all.
So far, I haven’t found anything I don’t like about Flock and I recommend it for anyone who is environmentally oriented. Even if you don’t use it all the time, it’s handy to have on board for when you want to delve more deeply into environmental sites. If you’re a social butterfly, there’s the original version of Flock that easily integrates photos sharing sites and many other social venues, including Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and many more.
My advice is that you give one of them a try and see if Flock works for you. If you do, drop me a comment and let me know how you like it.
Tags: Flock, browsers, ecobrowser, green internet
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by matt, on May 16 2008 @ 3:44 pm
Great tip! I’ve not heard of Flock before, but this would be perfect. I’m so happy with Firefox that I’ll need to test side by side, but (as you note), since it’s built on Mozilla, the transition should be seamless. Thanks!