Hi Interweb-

So I downloaded Flock v1.0.5 today, and have been tooling around in it for a few hours today. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert (is it Flockstar?), but I can say that for those folks who are moderate to heavy users of social networking tools, this browser is a big time saver.

The People Sidebar and Media Bar are really cool. You can configure them to look into your Facebook, Twitter, Flick, etc profile, and grab latest updates from there. The People Sidebar will show you your friends and what they are doing (I wish there were a way to have people only listed once in the “All” view), and any actions allowable via API can be performed right from the sidebar (ex/ Facebook “poke” or “message”). The Media bar shows a cool iPhone-esque scrolling set of images from Flickr, Photobucket, etc.

There is a nice-looking Feeds Sidebar, which when activated lays on top of the People Sidebar. It shows all feeds with new entries, and lets you click “All Articles” to see all new items in the main pane of the browser.

There is a sidebar for Bookmarks (Favorite Sites), and there is a Web Clipboard, which lets you drag text, links and images to save them for later use.

You can also use the Blog Editor to blog directly from the browser.

I took a look at the Add-Ons available, and downloaded the Me.dium Add-On. Will try it when I restart the browser.

All in all, Flock is vastly improved since the last time I tried it (v0.9). All of the sidebars and the media bar fit together nicely to give a rich, yet not distracting, social media experience. Nice job guys! I’ll need to run both Flock and Opera for a little while to see which way I’ll go as my primary browser.

Now all they need is a Propeller.com plugin for their People Sidebar.

Update: I must have read it wrong, so Me.dium is YA social network that I either need to build from scratch, or assume that my e-mail contacts are the correct source for. I don’t feel like doing the former, and the latter is untrue. Ah well, you can’t win everything. I just thought it was going to be a tool that I could use with my existing subscriptions, for some neat visualizations. Not so, apparently.