Will People Flock to a New Web Browser?
Flock Inc. has just released a new “social browser” that lets users interact with their favorite or most popular social networks on the web. Based upon Firefox and other Mozilla technologies, it is available for both Mac and PC and supports Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Blogsome, Wordpress, del.icio.us, TypePad, Twitter, Photobucket, Blogger, Livejournal, Xanga.com, Magnolia, and Piczo.
Flock neatly packages all its social networking features for easy access and updating, but I’m wondering why they created an entire browser to do this. Maybe the company should have partnered with all popular browsers and offered one plug-in that aggregates all social network information, but most browsers already have plug-ins that do this. Whenever a new social network pops up you will need to install a new plug-in into your Flock browser, so the maintenance is similar to most browsers out there.
It seems as if Flock is more like a social network that lets you manage all your existing social networks. But I’m not sure I’m ready to invest in yet another network, especially when I can do all this and more from my Google home page. It will be interesting to see how Google integrates all its great social features and web applications into one mobile OS. Something tells me this generation will be updating their social sites from their wireless devices on the go and not so much on their desktops.