Tag Archives: Flock

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Am I a Lifestream Junkie?

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So I’m now trying out a third Lifestream utility – well fourth or fifth if you include the people bar on Flock or the solution I cobbled together using Facebook applications. Thanks to an article on TechCrunch this morning, I’m trying out a beta release of SocialThing! alongside FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse.

I have to say, I didn’t set out to run three in parallel. I tried out FriendFeed to use as a replacement for the multiple applications on Facebook. The big problem with those was that not all of them updated automatically – thanks to limitations in the applications, some of them often needed a kick to get updates to be registered. FriendFeed takes feeds from all of the sites I use day to day, and posts them eventually into my Facebook feeds. Thanks to the way FriendFeed works – using RSS feeds, plus the vagaries of updates to the Facebook mini-feed it does sometimes take a little while for updates to get through.

The Plaxo Pulse account came as a side effect of my having given Plaxo a go for trying to get my address book and calendar details transferred to home. Again this is using RSS feeds for updates so is a bit slow.

Having said that, whilst both sites bring together all of my own updates, they don’t bring together all my friends updates unless they also sign up to the relevant site. FriendFeed has a couple of contacts, as does Plaxo, but on my people bar on Flock there are massively more people. The other annoyance with Flock is that the people bar is totally independent on each of the different computers that I am running it on.

This is the particular advantage of SocialThing!. Unlike FriendFeed and Plaxo Pulse it isn’t working on RSS feeds – instead, in much the same way as Flock it uses the various API’s provided by the supported sites to link all of your information together. Again as with Flock this limits the number of supported third-party sites, however it does mean that it gives me a complete view of all of my friends in one place without them having to sign up on the SocialThing! site.

SocialThing! have a new little FAQ document which explains the differences between what they are trying to do and FriendFeed. Whilst I can see from the explanation how they’re different, my thought is that to the man on the street the difference is pretty subtle, FriendFeed, SocialThing! and Plaxo Pulse, along with a number of other sites are all doing essentially the same thing, and certainly a good few of them are going to fall by the way side.

Having said that, on initial impressions if SocialThing! can get things into the Facebook mini-feed and also support my blog, that would remove the need for FriendFeed… Equally if FriendFeed can pull in all my friends from various services automatically in the same way as SocialThing! has done, then I could go with FriendFeed – and of course the same applies to Plaxo Pulse. They are all doing slightly different things, which if combined would offer me the solution I wanted. Until then, I guess I’m going to continue looking like a Lifestream Junkie…

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Annoying Flock Problem

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I’ve come across a somewhat annoying problem in my testing of Flock. I set the people bar up with my main accounts when I initially installed, but then yesterday I logged onto my twitter account for the first time in ages.

That shouldn’t be too much of a problem, as the browser is supposed to – and did pick up on my account details and offer to remember them in the people bar, unfortunately it totally failed to pick up anything more than the most basic details of the account.

I then tried clearing out my accounts and reattaching them, at which point everything else on the people bar behaved in the same way – in the end I had to reinstall Flock and recreate my profile.

The problem is not confined to the PC version. Having found the problem, I then tried adding twitter on the Mac, and exactly the same happened – I guess I’ll have to zap the profile on there too.

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Trying Out Flock (Again)

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I first gave Flock a try in the middle of last year. The mixture of a Firefox base, and out of the box support for a number of the social networking sites that I use regularly seemed quite attractive. Unfortunately although I liked what I saw, it didn’t really feel ready for the big time back then. It crashed quite a few times, and although the integration with sites like Flickr was fairly good, it wasn’t enough to get me to switch.

Over the intervening months I’ve continued to keep my copy updated, but in general Firefox has been my browser of choice, however on hearing about the release of version 1.0, and also reading some of the positive reaction, for example here and here, the time seemed right to give it another go, and I’ve been running it as my main browser for the past couple of days.

So far the impression has been pretty good. Whilst it is true that I could get a lot of the functionality into Firefox through extensions, here everything just works out of the box. There is a bit of initial setup, pointing the browser at all your various accounts, but in general that is just a question of going to the relevant web page and logging on. There is a nice sidebar that keeps track of when contacts on sites like Flickr upload pictures, and then if I want to see what has been added I can just click the media button and their photo stream appears across the top of the window. In amongst all of that, it’s just really stable, not a hiccup so far.

So what are the downsides? The biggest is if you’re making significant use of a site that’s not really supported. In my case that is Google Reader that I use for all my feed reading as it maintains a consistent state across any of the methods by which I read the feeds, be that iPod Touch, mobile phone, work PC or Mac at home. Whilst Flock apparently has a pretty good feed reader, I’m not using it – the feed functionality has been set to subscribe to feeds in Google Reader instead. To get me using the built in feed reader, it will really need to be able to operate as a front end to Google Reader to ensure that everything is kept in sync.

The other significant part of the application I haven’t used as yet is the blog editor, primarily because I’m quite happy using Ecto instead. Although I know I’m not using all of the features of that client, I’m perfectly happy using it to type blog postings, although I guess I may give the Flock client a go at some point in the future.

So should you be giving Flock a go? Certainly if you spend a lot of time on the social networking sites it is worth a look. Also if you’ve been having problems with Firefox you might have better luck with it as although it is based on Firefox code, it has diverged from that codebase in a couple of areas, so you may find you feel more comfortable with Flock rather than Firefox. I’ve currently got it set as my default browser, so we’ll see how things go with it over the next few days. If you fancy giving it a go, the install can be downloaded from www.flock.com.

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Giving Flock a Try

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flock_beta_1.jpg

You may have spotted the announcement of a first beta release of Flock. I gave one of the pre-beta versions a try out a few months back, but ultimately stuck with Firefox as my primary browser due to the lack of stability with the pre-beta software. However this new version of Flock promises to be better.

Under the covers, Flock is based on Firefox. What makes it different is that it integrates with a number of services that I make use of such as del.icio.us, Flickr and Technorati. It also includes the ability to post to a blog straight from the browser, and a multi-item clipboard similar to many that turn up in programming tools and word processors.

So far it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. The Mac version crashed several times at annoying moments, so I’m back with Firefox for the moment. PC wise it seems a bit more stable, and since I don’t tend to do as much with the browser on the PC, I’m still using Flock. I haven’t tried out the blogging tools, as Ecto does me just fine. Having said that, I suspect it might come in useful for a quick post now and again. The del.icio.us integration is okay, but I have to say that I can find my way around the existing del.icio.us button I have on the toolbar in Firefox.

I have to say that the part that has impressed me the most so far is the Flickr top bar, which is very nice and smooth, and is also able to pull out pictures from other photostreams on Flickr – having said that, it’s still not impressing me enough to suggest that Flock would be my browser of choice. To be honest on current impressions it isn’t doing enough to differentiate itself and make it stand out from Firefox and a good selection of extensions.