I've always prided myself to be part of the bleeding edge, part of that so called "long tail" when it came to technology and the whole Web 2.0 movement. Before I go any further, I should probably define what Web 2.0 is. This is where the problems begin; there is no clear cut definition of Web 2.0. In fact, I don't think there's any consensus on the subject at all. The only thing that people seem to agree on is that its "the next big thing". Are there examples of Web 2.0? Sure. Digg, the social bookmarking and technology website is a prime example. Slashdot, Podcasting, Ajax and Flickr all come to mind as well. The latest foray into the world of Web 2.0 comes in the form of a browser based on the Mozilla framework - Flock. Flock aims to be the standard bearers of the next generation web browsers and has a lot of promise; lets take a look at the beginnings of the future. The Premise The basic premise surrounding Flock is the idea that it "should be easy for everyone to contribute to and participate on the web". Flock does this by integrating blogging, social bookmarking and photo-sharing all within the browser window. Blogging Flock has a fully integrated blogging framework. You can currently update your Wordpress, Movable Type, Typepad, Live Journal and Blogger based blogs from within the browser. Setting up a blog is actually really simple and quite intuitive. I had my blogger based "The Lonely Canadian" ready for updating in about 3 minutes. My technologically impaired friends had it ready in about 5 minutes. All you have to do is launch the preferences, click on blogging and add your blog. The developers really did a good job with the setup. Social Bookmarking and Tagging Heres where the community aspect of "Web 2.0" really comes into play. Social bookmarking via sites like Technorati, Digg.com and del.ico.us allow you to share interesting articles and links with the rest of the world. This site uses del.ico.us tags to not only help me categorize articles, but let you all link up to other articles on similar subjects. Flock lets you "tag" certain sites and automatically add it to your del.ico.us bookmarks via the "Star" button beside the address bar. It honestly is a great way to share your interests with both your friends and the rest of the world. The last thing I'm going to mention is Flocks ability to easily add and share pictures from your Flickr account. Flickr has become the default online image storer. Flickr itself is a huge web-based community. Flock takes the best of what Flickr has to offer and melds it seamlessly into the browser. By launching the Flickr top bar, you not only get a chance to see recently posted photos from other users, ,you can see what pictures are loaded in your Flickr account. So what? Well, with Flickr photos right at your finger tips, it becomes really easy to add photos to your Blog. Drawbacks With all these great new features, there must be some drawbacks right? Well currently Flock is still in early development, so you can expect the occasional crash and hiccup with the program. Other than that, I believe that Flock will become the quintessential Web 2.0 browser. It's just that cool. |
