New iteration of Flock browser bolsters Twitter, multi-service support

Of all the specialized browsers out there, Flock is perhaps the one best suited to the social-networking scene, with support for a constellation of services such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and so on. To date it's been a nice way of keeping an eye on one's daily flood of information, but serious interaction required that you pop open a browser window. (Such a burden.)

You might find you never need to do so again with the 2.5 version, just released for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Those who closely follow streams from highly prolific twitterbugs may need to go to the main browser window from time to time, but for most purposes, the Twitter reader in Flock rises to the level of the very best standalone readers. (And their new non-Twitter toys aren't so shabby either.)

We looked at Flock on both Windows and the Mac. The Vista machine's clean install was seamless; the Mac's update from the previous version went smoothly enough, managing not to drop any of the 74 tabs currently open on that system. (Don't judge. Flock does however recommend backing up one's profile before upgrading.) Interestingly, the Flock startup process now recognizes enough services to require that they not all be displayed on a single screen. Twenty-two services are currently known to Flock, including webmail favorites such as Google, AOL and Yahoo (still no Hotmail); seven dedicated blogging services; and multimedia options such as YouTube and Truveo.

Flock also, for the first time, supports in-browser chat, specifically Facebook's chat function. Sending a link over to a friend was as simple as dragging and dropping the object onto her username in a picklist at the lower right of the window. We found that we had to login twice to get the feature going -- once for the usual sidebar Facebook feed, once for Chat -- and it periodically insisted that we were offline even when the sidebar was updating without incident. (A restart seemed to clear things up.)

FlockCast has similar ease-of-sharing goals, allowing you to more easily post the same update to more than one service -- a blog post duplicated to your Facebook page, for instance, or a status to all the services you care to inform of your whereabouts. It that's just too much sharing, you can disable all of FlockCast as part of your Privacy preferences.

Most notably, Twitter support has radically improved, with the "sidebar" reader now very nearly as good as a dedicated Twitter readers. One's feeds can be sorted alphabetically or in the order they were tweeted. The old "terse" display style, which required the user to roll over a specific tweet to read the whole thing (cranky functionality under some circumstances), can be toggled to a full-view version with fully clickable URLs. One click gets you to direct messages and @mentions, which are tabbed options above the usual feed of followers' posts. Notifications of new DMS and @mentions are clear and obvious.

Best of all for regulars, retweets, replies and direct messages are utterly simple -- one click, a pop-up appears, and off you go. That single change may be the most compelling upgrade for many users. It's good enough that it could conceivably even affect Twitter itself, since the reasons one would need to visit the site (and view the ads) just dropped to a small and out-of-the-ordinary subset.

The "My World" page isn't everyone's cup of tea; it seems that either you find it a useful overview of the day or you do not. For those unconvinced, Flock's brought up its Twitter game here too, adding a Search Widget that pulls in live search results on whatever topic's on your mind. You can also save individual searches as widgets of their own, though we noticed that search doesn't go back infinitely far.

We're quite taken with Flock's new Twitter attitude, which shows both applications development intelligence and a close understanding of how people actually use the service. Would that Twitter were so well-behaved. As we worked through our review process, the service started flailing, sending random tweets to telephones that have long since blocked SMS messages from that service. Perhaps Flock should consider adding a Twitter status alert to the sidebar in future editions; this extraordinarily well-thought-out update is certainly in better shape than the service itself.

Flock 2.5 is available immediately for Windows, Mac, and Linux. However, current users are advised that the "check for updates" option in the browser's help menu is not yet aware of this. (We Twittered this factoid and quickly had responses from @flocker and Flock VP of Engineering @claytonstark, noting that they're still testing the auto-updates.) The browser can be downloaded directly from the site. For the moment only the US English version has been updated, but more localization is forthcoming.