Flock of delays over, Flock debuts

I took a call last month with Bart Decrem of Flock (right), an open source project using the Gecko rendering engine of Firefox for a browser supporting social features like blogging, tagging and photo sharing.

Unfortunately, the code wasn’t ready. It wasn’t ready when we talked, and it wasn’t ready for Web 2.0, where it was due to be announced.

It’s ready now. Developers are urged to get downloading. It's available under the GPL and Mozilla Public License.

Decrem said the "low hanging fruit" Flock is focused on in "social browsing" is simply the sharing of bookmarks. "That’s the problem of helping users flag comments, organize them, retrieve them, and share them. We’re putting bookmarks online, allowing them to be shared, incorporating tagging, floating Web sites you go to regularly to the top, and incorporating a search engine so you can search pages you visit frequently.

"The second area we’re focused on is talking back to the Web, making it more two-way. So we’re incorporating a blog editor inside the browser, and the ability to drag-and-drop content into it. That means we’re integrating online blogging services into the browser."

So a browser that lets you share bookmarks and do your blogging locally. Check it out and let us know what you think of it.

By that I mean let the developers know what's wrong with it and let us know what you think of it. Do we need it? Is a replacement browser the way forward for Web 2.0 applications? Should blogging be done inside your Web client, or is that something for a server? Is this trip really necessary?

I mean, what do you think of it?