Flocking Brilliant!

Flock is a new Mozilla Firefox-based browser that is optimized for the package of technologies that is becoming known as "Web 2.0." A very early developer release has just been made available for downloading at the Flock developer site.

Get the Flock outta here.

So what makes Flock different, and special?

• It has excellent RSS integration, making it possible to quickly see when your favorite blogs and sites have been updated. If you create a collection of site feeds (e.g., a collection of news sites) it aggregates them on the fly--in other words, it groups them together for viewing automatically.
  
  
• Instead of bookmarks stored on your own machine, Flock uses del.icio.us, a "social bookmarking" service, making it easier for you to share your bookmarks with others (if you choose.) It's a snap to add tags to your favorites/bookmarks, too.
  
  
• If you're a blogger, you can use tools built into Flock to compose blog entries on the fly. Flock includes a blog editor that works with WordPress, Movable Type, Typepad (and shortly also Live Journal) and Blogger.
  
  
  
  Blogging about Flock, in Flock
  
  
• If you've got a Flickr account, you can share photos automagically within Flock. Just drag your pictures to the "topbar" in Flock.
  
  
• Flock indexes the pages you visit and has a built-in search history, thus taking a big step towards solving the problem of "I saw this on the Web a couple days ago... dammit, where was it?"
  

Fair warning: this is a very early "developer release," and it's probably not stable enough for everyday use. However, it is a *very* promising and interesting look at where web browsers may be going. Flock is available now for Windows, Mac and Linux users.