The next big thing?

People online are saying that this is the biggest thing since the original graphical web browser came out in 1994--a year before Windows 95!  (The original graphical web browser was Mosaic and was created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  Interestingly, this is the same place HAL 9000 was supposedly created in the movie 2001.)  

The idea is to bring the power of Web 2.0 to your browser.  Sounds mushy, but after five minutes of futzing it looks like it has a lot of promise.  It's called "Flock."

Flock takes Mozilla--the same browser engine used by Firefox and Netscape--and adds panes for your favorite Web 2.0 web sites like Flickr, Facebook, and even your own blog (I wrote this blog post using Flock!).  The idea is the same idea as Web 2.0 itself: information is fluid.  See a cool picture?  Add it to your Flickr account and share it with your Facebook friends.  All at once.  See a cool website, like Flock.com?  Right-click and select "blog this," and it sends you straight to an editor where you can write a blog post.

These are all things that you can do with traditional browsers like Firefox.  But the strength of Flock is that it brings them all together into one place at the same time.  It's faster and more convenient, and helps you think about information in ways you previously didn't (I never really thought about sharing Flickr photos with Facebook friends before).

Is it really the Next Big Thing?  Let's just say "the hearing is continued."*

Flock - The Social Web Browser

*That's a reference to Russian literature.  If you get it, you're awesome.

Blogged with Flock