What happened to Flock!?

I'm sure I've touched on Flock on my blog before. It's a modern browser built upon Firefox, but includes a ton of 'social' features.  You can write blog posts from the GUI, you can view someone's flickr feed, or drag pages / pictures onto 'your shelf' which would save them for later..

I last checked out Flock at version 0.7. Its yet to reach v1 but it looked promising, however, I rely on a few Firefox add-ons to allow me to do my web-design work, and most of these add-ons would not work with flock, so I stuck with firefox until Flock progressed.

So I was naturally interested when I read on the flock blog that version 0.9 had been released.  Not seeing 0.8, i was expecting a few major features to be included.  I wasn't wrong.

The one thing I immediately noticed was the interface.  It honestly looks like something AOL would produce.  It looks far to cluttered and messy.  It looks like they've tried to fit a button for every feature within the interface. 

I liked flock's previous interface. It was clean, it was uncluttered.  It just worked.  This time though, I was immediately turned off.

However, most of the features were still there.  I noticed the flickr feed (or media stream) as it's now known.  That also covers YouTube too!

Flock also allows you to create blog posts within the browser.. Neat trick that!  But i like Windows Live Writer, even though it takes an age to load!! Grr

Flock also includes an uploader, which uploads images somewhere. Not too sure where though as it says i need a photo account, which i have no need for.  Meh!

Im glad the Shelf is there.  Although it's now called 'Web Clipboard' (What's with renaming everything flock!?)

Rss Feeds seem to work nicely, but im happy with bloglines.  Work's a treat that!

The other big thing with Flock 0.9 is 'My World'.  A page which displays a yahoo search bar, some new bits of news from the RSS feeds, and a list of the most recent favourites added... It also shows thumbnails from your favorite media that you've starred.  Handy i guess.

All in all, im quite disappointed with the way Flock has turned out.  I'm not sure what's gone on with the UI but it seems very very messy and off-putting!  I'll still keep an eye on Flock, to see how it progresses but I'll stick with Firefox.

Check out www.flock.com for more info!