{{ http://static.flickr.com/67/167106885_50f045bd59.jpg?300×200|Flock}}

I’d been avoiding [[http://flock.com|Flock]] for all this while, but a couple of days back when the [[http://www.flock.com/blog/introducing-flock-beta-1|first beta was announced]], I could not resist giving it a whirl. The [[http://flock.com/tour|tour]] looked really inviting and I was curious to see what all this nonsense about a //social browser// was. I’ve been playing around with it for only a day and here are my initial impressions:

{{http://static.flickr.com/52/167579683_e52912b54f.jpg|Photo bar}}

* Just Works (TM): the import wizard is pretty neat, and you wouldn’t realize you’re not running your Firefox profile. Hooking up my different accounts (Flickr, WordPress, del.icio.us) with Flock was a breeze and pretty much everything worked out of the box. Its actually becoming the norm these days, people are beginning to //expect// that even things on Linux should just work, which is good :-)
* Pretty: Flock is beautiful. I love the [[http://www.flickr.com/photos/leoofborg/55446235/|icons]], the search bar, the photo bar, the snippet bar and the news reader. Its all very polished and good looking.
* Fast: Memory usage actually seems better than Firefox (though I’m not sure which version of the Firefox code base is Flock Beta1 build from).

{{http://static.flickr.com/47/167000178_e888e2fd76_o.jpg|News reader}}

Some minor gripes:
* Blog editor: It currently //forces// that you write your posts in HTML. I usually write my posts in plain text, and let my [[http://floatingsun.net/code/wp-dokuwiki|WP-Dokuwiki]] plugin take care of the HTML generation. So the blog editor in its current form is not very useful for me, for longer, detailed posts. However, for snippets and asides, its perfect, specially due to the integration with the snippet bar.
* OPML import: There’s no way to import my existing feed collection into Flock. I don’t want to add each feed one at a time. Add an OPML export while you’re at it.
* Greasemonkey doesn’t work: This seems to be a [[http://bugzilla.flock.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2759|known bug]].

So far I’m having fun using it. Go ahead, give it a shot!