Final Flock Beta Review

This will be my last post about Flock until it is released. I've had some fun with Flock with but now I've pretty much switched back to firefox full time. It's an interesting concept, but not one with mainstream appeal. Nothing wrong with being niche.

Overall Strengths:
1. The blogging is great, especially the ease of tagging. Maybe it's pure coincidence, but my "web 2.0 picks" blog was by far one of my most read of all time, tagging may have played a role in this.
2. It's essentially a skinned firefox, so if you like firefox you should like most of what Flock is about
3. I enjoy the integration with del.icio.us, but prefer the del.icio.us extension for firefox.
4. Web Standards support
5. Clucene, the open source search engine that searches your history as you type into the search box, is a nice feature for quick access to places you've been.

Weaknesses
1. Although it was on my strengths list the del.icio.us integration is also part of why I am sticking with Firefox as my primary browser. I don't like the fact that you cannot (or at least it's not obvious how to) bookmark sites outside of del.icio.us. This probably is not a problem for most, but as a web developer there are times that I release features or even entire sites that I don't want the public to have access to yet, being able to bookmark these things out of del.icio.us would be a big plus.
2. Feed Aggregation. It's sort of a pain if you like to control what feeds you read when. I really prefer Firefox's live bookmark. I like it better than Opera's feed reader, but I think it needs some work.
3. On the subject of feeds, Flock should join in with Microsoft and Mozilla and use the standard RSS button. I think the uniformity will be helpful to users, a consistent user experience lets users know what they're getting.

Overall, I think that Flock asks you to give up too much control of how you like to use your browser in exchange for some cool features that you could get elsewhere. Good concept, and I really like the design of it, but let me do things my way.

I think that it will get better.

Side notes:
I have purchased a new domain and hosting plan for my new blog, so this space will soon be disappearing.
"Lopico Lovers" - my review program - is set to launch in the next couple of weeks.
I did my first podcast yesterday, it's available on odeo, and not very good or interesting.
I've been noticing a large amount of traffic coming from my "web 2.0 picks" posting, I'll probably set up a cleaned up version to go along with the launch of the new blog.

Links from this post:
Odeo
Del.icio.us
Flock
Firefox
Clucene
Opera
Internet Explorer
Why are the links down here instead of inline? It's a new idea I'm trying out, comment if you like it or hate it, thanks.