Flock, the "social browser"

Flock, a new Mozilla Firefox based browser has caught the attention of many coz of its innovative features, especially the ones for social networking sites.

I decided to give the Flock a try. Well, firefox was getting a bit boring. :P Anyway, so after googling "flock", I was directed to the official site which had the download link. The file size is around 12.6MB for the latest version, and have to say, compared to firefox, this was almost double the size of any standard browser. After downloading, the installation was a breeze. No stupid customization questions, simple express setup and youre done.

Next came the task of figuring out how the thing worked. First up, the interface looks damn cool! But to be frank, its not really simple. One needs time to get accustomed to it. If you're a newbie, chances are you wont really like this stuff much. Anyway, once you've got the "adaptation" thing sorted out, the next part is about signing in to various sites. Easy enough? Wrong! No matter how many times I signed in, the Flock would show that I wasnt actually signed in. This is really a pain in the arse!

Now the best part of flock is that you can acess all the social networking sites and various other sites, just by cling on the "people sidebar". And you're logged in to all those sites simultaneously, which is really really cool! The other awesome feature of flock is the fact that no matter what site you visit and even if you havent logged in to facebook, you will be able to see and edit your status as well as chat with your friends in the status bar of the browser itself! Also, the fact you can post on your blogs right from the browser itself is another innovative feature. Now if that isnt mind blowing, I dont know what is! :)

However I do miss some customisation options of firefox. Say for example, the fact that you could add a keyword to every bookmark of yours (unavailabe in flock) is something you wont find in many browsers.

To sum it all up, flock is a cool browser which introduces a completely new genre of "social browsing", something which I hope the rival companies like IE or Opera will pick up soon. But the program as of now is very much in beta and isnt really something which I would call "error free". However its a start and thats what's important.

New to Twitter?

Image via CrunchBaseTwitter. A strange name which has taken the world by storm. Has it? Oh well, we'll see.

The thing is I had never even heard of twitter just till just a few months back. I still clearly remember that day. I was watching Larry King Live on CNN and Ashton Kutcher was on the show. Kutcher kept mentioning about this new social networking phenomenon called twitter.

I checked out the site that day itself. Signing up was suprisingly easy and to be frank the really user friendly interface got me hooked immediately. Now that I had signed up, my next task was getting to know how all of it worked.

So what I was supposed to do was answer a simple question 'what are you doing?' Cool enough? Absolutely! Next you follow others whose updates aka tweets you would like to receive. And if that person isnt a total moron or a celeb youre likely to get followed in return. So your follower count rises and so does your popularity. It is true that unless you have gathered a substantial number of followers you wont really get the essence of twitter. In other words, you will need time to get yourself accustomed to this new medium. But once you get used to it, it'll take over your life in every possible way.