Flock Beta; Your Social Network is Chrome-d
I believe, most people who do browse the internet has more than one browser. According to w3schools statistics in May 2010, Mozilla Firefox is the most used browser with 46.9% worldwide. But, according to W3Counter statistics, the most used browser until May 2010 is Internet Explorer with 45.7%. I don’t know which one is true but I think this difference because they have different sources. That’s reasonable, isn’t?!
Now, when we look at the statistic about what people browse we found that they love social networking. Facebook, the social network site, is number two in top 100 sites globally and YouTube is the third. From this statistic, we know that people in this world are love social network. Learn from the statistics, Flock released the Flock Beta which comes with social networking plugin built-on just like what they have done before.
What cool is, this Flock based on Chromium Project, the open source software project behind Google’s Chrome Web browser and the Chrome OS. This Flock version puts social networking features very different from the previous. They are still a pervasive and tightly integrated part of the user interface, but the manner in which they are exposed to the end user is more subtle and less intrusive.
The basic look and feel of this Flock is just like what Chrome is, with tabs on top and a menu button embedded in the toolbar. However, the user interface artwork is slightly different. Flock CEO Shawn Hardin explained that one of his major design goals for this new version was to shrink Flock’s user interface footprint and make it as streamlined as possible.
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The difference of the social networking feature is they put a social sidebar that displays a stream of messages from the user’s contacts. The sidebar combines the messages from all of the user’s accounts and displays them in a unified stream. This version also allow user to manage the groups and favourites for their social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, Flickr and feeds.
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Since it’s based on Chromium Project, user can use all of Chrome extensions except Google Sync. And the last feature added I found is user can share what they browse with one button click and even better because the link is shorten.
I’ve been trying this Flock version and I found this one is gorgeous. While I found my Chrome browser crashed more than one per day, this Flock crashed once since installed on my computer. Light, clean, and stable. So, I’d like to say ‘this Flock is totally Chrome-d’. (tpos/sm/ne)