Mozilla recently introduced a Social Networking Browser that allows you to see and act on activities and news of your preferred social networks in one view. More than that, it allows you to create blog posts offline in its own editor, allows you to immediately upload favorite links and pages to an online service such as de.licio.us, or allows you to store links and pictures in a storage space for later use. There are many more, very interesting features. I am going to explore it and tell you if this is something to recommend to students or have in mind when doing the programme design/delivery innovation.
http://flock.com/tour/features.php
Here are some of my first observations:
I have been disappointing that I cannot use the block editor. Somehow Typepad advanced accounts and Flock don't work together yet as smoothly as they said. So I am still writing this in the conventional way :(
BUT
Every thing else is a joy to use.
I don't have to keep open 10 tabs at all time to see activities of my email accounts and social network sites. Its all easily accessible either via my world or via other buttons in the Flock browser interface (i.e. mail)
Regarding how services are accessed and represented, the user interface might have some inconsistencies, but I am sure they will be attended to in further versions (OR I get used to).
The most enjoyable component for myself is the way you can handle snippets from the internet, such as links or pictures to store them intermediately and use them i.e. in blog posts or to send them on to yourself to other people. For instance, pictures you drag from a website into this web clipboard are stored on a separate server. You can send on the link to this particular picture or use it in any other way on the web. I find this genius! This will simplify a lot of my blogging, not needing to download everything onto my computer, it simply stays online when it is used online.
I also enjoy using 'my world'. I have always been an advocate of all information on one view. I do use this overview page to quickly see what is happening in the news, in my social world...
I still have to explore more about all other features. the media browser seems also very interesting.
I in fact adopted the browser within one day and set it as primary browser. I think this speaks for itself. I keep updating my experiences here.