First look at Flock 0.9... it's a powerful social media browser

Last night I had the chance to receive a demo of the new Flock 0.9 browser with CEO Shawn Hardin. The official launch is next week but if you want to grab the preview today, check it out on their beta page along with the welcome information. Also check out my discussion with Shawn from last week.

Overall I would say that the comparisons to Firefox are no longer warranted. This is a very powerful browser for those of you who use social networking and social media heavily. There is a pretty hefty initial setup curve to get all of your social accounts setup but you only have to do this once.

The first thing Shawn walked me through is what he calls the "differentiated value bar" - which is shown below. The options here expose the power of Flock and include a Web Clipboard which basically allows you to quickly save any bit of content by dragging it to the clipboard. Items are saved until you remove them.

Also included are a feed sidebar which is basically a slick feed manager, media bar manager and one click access to blogging and uploading.

The Media Bar is a way to see your (and your friends) media in a quick and efficient way. The "media streams" stay updated in real-time so if your friend adds a new image that falls into one of your defined areas, it will appear automatically. The Media Bar works with all of the services that are incorporated in Flock (listed below). Inside the media streams window there is a search option to search your streams and/or search your providers. A quicker way to get to the media you need than going to each individual site.

Currently Flock 0.9 has the following media services setup:

• Media Sharing: Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube
• Blogging: Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, Typepad, Wordpress.com, Xanga, Self Hosted (I couldn't get it to work with Drupal)
• Online Favorites: del.icio.us, Magnolia

Flock continues to allow one click blogging and uploading. They have beefed up the upload tool which allows you to resize, rotate, etc to any photo and create tags and descriptions for each one or for a batch. Then you upload the media to any service you have setup. On the flickr upload example, it's like the standalone flickr uploader on steroids.

Other features include a bug/feedback system, one click favorites (love this); "My World" which is basically a start page that keeps track of your favorite sites, feeds and media; and the ability to save favorites locally, online or both.

Shawn closed the demo by saying he is most excited about the updates coming this summer and the 1.0 release in the early fall which will include some significant upgrades (he wouldn't tell me what they are). My suggestion is simple... if you are a heavy user of the social tools listed above, give Flock a try. If you tried it before and gave up, I would take another look. I am impressed by what I saw and while this isn't the browser for everyone, their target audience should find a great value in Flock.