Mrs. Mecomber’s Scrapbook

I’ve been slow to join the social network. I only recently joined MyBlogLog yet I still have no MySpace or Facebook profile. I’ve loved blogging and I do love to interact with people, but I prefer forums and emails to the fluffier MySpace place.

There’s a browser out there specially designed for cyber-socialites. It’s the Flock Browser. I downloaded long ago when it was first released. I really liked it then, but it was a little too slow. Flock is a Firefox shell– it runs with a Mozilla Firefox machine but has Flock fenders and fins. I’d heard that a new release of Flock was out, so I wanted to try it.

I’m very impressed with its social networking capabilities. I can log into my accounts at Blogger, Wordpress, Flickr, Photobucket, and etc with a few easy clicks. Talk about convenient! With Firefox, I have to individually go to each account and manually log in– not fun. I like Flock because I can log in to everything so easily.

I’m not terribly impressed with its appearance and interface. It’s a little clunky and bloated. It has too many buttons, big ones and little ones, all competing for my attention when I want to give my attention to the site I am on. It’s like staring at that gorgeous curly maple dashboard in your BMW so that you aren’t paying attention to the road.

Flock was also very slow for me. There was a distinct lag with everything I did, and I grew impatient with it very quickly. I closed the entire thing out and went right back to Firefox, as a matter of fact.

I think Flock still has some work to do. They’ve made great strides in flexibility, but it is too cumbersome and far too cutsie. Maybe there are different (read: more mature) skins for it. I was too disgusted to check after experiencing the annoying the lag time. Maybe when I am more patient I will try again. For the meantime, it’s back to individual logons with Firefox. Unless someone out there knows of an Addon for Firefox that will do the job…