Flock 1.1 Arrives in Two Weeks

Flock, the Social Web Browser, has announced that the Flock 1.1 beta will launch in just two weeks. The browser, built on Firefox code, is designed for social interaction on the web, with features built into the browser just for this purpose. Flock chose last week's Macworld conference to show off the new version. With the upcoming release, several new features will be added, including Yahoo and Gmail support, Picassa integration, and a friend activity feed.

The integration of the popular webmail services from Yahoo and Gmail will allow users to share web pages, images, articles, and links with their friends using a click-to-compose function built right into the browser. By just clicking the email icon in the URL bar, Flock users can instantly share these items with their friends. When new mail arrives, the Flock Mail icon will light up to let users know to check their inbox. This is especially handy since webmail doesn't alert users of incoming mail the way that Outlook or other desktop clients do, forcing them to either keep checking it in a browser tab, using an add-on, or some sort of 3rd party notification software.

Image Credit: CNet Networks

As to why email was the next bigfeature to be included, Flock's CEO, Shawn Hardin, states that "Email is the single most frequently used communication application on the web, and is often overlooked as social activity."The new Picasa feature will let users of the popular photo-sharing service quickly upload pictures to Picasa from Flock. To share these photos, users can email them via web mail or just drag and drop them onto the Flock People sidebar, the same way that YouTube videos, flickr photos, Photobucket photos, and others are shared in version 1.0.

The Friend Activity feed is like Facebook's News Feed, expect that it tracks your friends recent activities across all of Flock’s supported services. The feed will inform users when their friends update their Flock profile or online status, upload new photos, and it even displays their Twitter updates.

The new version will be available for as a free download for Mac, PC and Linux in two weeks at www.Flock.com.

Zotero Is Your Online Research Assistant

Zotero (pronounced “zoh-TAIR-oh”) is a new browser plugin that is aiming to help you with your online research for any number of projects.

This tool will help you automatically store citations of webpages used in your research, store PDFs, take notes, export information, integrates with WordPress… basically it sounds like it will take out all the tedium of research and just let you concentrate on the important parts of looking for sources. I’m not sure there is any bigger pain in the universe than writing bibliography, so this sounds like a dream come true to me.

Currently the plugin works with Firefox 2.0, Netscape Navigator 9.0, or Flock 0.9.1, and is suited for cross-platform performance on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Flock: My Favorite Web Browser

Although it doesn't have as many addons as Firefox have (infact it only has 8-10 useful extensions) but it is really a Social Web Browser. If you are a bloger then its really really useful and handy. It has special features for blogging, media sharing on Facebook, Photobucket, Flicker, Youtube etc. and an easy to use Feed reader that lets you blog any feed entry you like. It has a media bar through which you can do a lot that i cannot explain in words. Give it a try ! I am sure you will also love it as i do ...

Blogged with Flock