Today, thanks to services such as Google's AdSense, Yahoo!'s Flickr  and Digg, Web 2.0 technology is getting very popular. According to  wikipedia, Web 2.0 "refers to a second generation of services  available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and  share information online." Keyword now is collaboration -- this is  indeed the age of participation, where users participate to improve  on products and services. Sounds familiar? Yeah, the Open Source  community has been doing it for years. :)

Going back to web browsing, whilst popular browsers I have mentioned  above support Web 2.0 services, as far as I know only one browser  provides a fully integrated approach and that is none other than Flock.

Flock is a Web 2.0 browser that is based on the same engine used by  Firefox and Camino. And like Firefox and Camino, it is freely  available for download and also supports Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Flock makes it easier for users to share photos with its integration  with Yahoo! Flickr and Photobucket. It periodically checks for new  photos shared by your buddies and alerts you of its availability.  Clicking on its Photo icon will display thumbnails of these photos  and also provide you with a quick interface to upload your own  collection of photos. Neat, huh? No need to login to the site to  upload your photos or downloading and installing a separate upload  client.

Bloggers will love this browser. Although there are blogging clients  such as ecto and MarsEdit, Flock's built-in blog client makes it easy  for bloggers to drag and drop items from websites to the blog editor  and then publish them. No need to keep track of those URLs anymore -  at least I don't. Hehehe. The blog editor has both rich-text and  source-level editing capabilities and support for Categories and  Tags. Not bad, huh? One gripe about this, though, Flock keeps a copy  of your blog entries in your computer. Whilst it is always a good  thing to keep back-ups of your data, personally, I find it rather  annoying. I just let my blog's database back-end maintain my data,  which I periodically back-up anyway. :)

Sharing bookmarks is one of the popular services of the Web 2.0  world. One of the most popular bookmark-sharing sites is del.icio.us.  Flock's integration with del.icio.us allows you to access your local  bookmarks whilst also accessing those bookmarks that you made public  via del.icio.us. If you are like me who loves to bookmark those how- to's, reference sites, funny videos and what not, del.icio.us  provides you with an unlimited bookmark space, which you can share  privately with your mates or share it with the rest of the world. My  local bookmarks only store websites that I visit frequently so I try  to keep it to a minimum.

One of the features that most Web 1.0 browsers have that Flock has  improved is the built-in RSS support. Flock presents it in such a way  that it is too easy for users to save news articles as bookmarks or  to blog about it. Try it out and I am sure that you'll love it.

Being on version 0.7.4, a bit far until the first full version  release, Flock has its share of bugs. Some of these are shared with  Firefox and Camino, whilst others are inherently its own. Inspite of  these bugs, however, Flock has been stable on my MacBook Pro and has  been the main browser for several days already. I have dumped my blog  editor, ecto, and my RSS reader, NetNewsWire, in favor of Flock.

Although Flock supports themes and extensions like Firefox, it will  have to do more to ensure full 100% compatibility with Firefox.  Firefox's configurability should also be added, i.e. I want to be  able to set how often Flickr and the RSS are polled before photos and  other data are retrieved.

Overall, this is one mean web browser for the new Web 2.0 era. If you  are still living in the late 90's, you better check out Flock and see  what you are missing. Believe me, you are missing a lot. Join us in  the age of participation!