Flock continues to impress

It has been quite a while since I last used Flock, and I had almost forgotten about it inspite of being impressed by it around this time last year. Today, I happened to chance upon Scoble’s latest post and there was a mention about a demo of Flock by one of its co-founders that was recorded by Scoble. I decided to download and put Flock through its paces.

I am happy to report that Flock has made impressive strides from the early days and it really does make the four common tasks (“fads” as per some) of the new age a whizz, viz., social bookmarking, photo sharing, rss feed reading, and of course, blogging, as you can make out from this picture:

Click on the pix to go to the Flickr page containing that photo.

Though I am impressed, the very fact that the latest version of Flock is based on Mozilla Firefox 1.x — and not 2.x that is in advanced Beta and that has tonnes of new features which beats every other browser out there — is reason enough for me to continue to stick to Firefox for the time being. For blogging I might use the Flock’s built in editor or continue to use the Performancing extension for Firefox. But I must admit that the Flock’s blog editor (using which I am posting this) is certainly pretty user friendly, though it can do with a few more toolbar buttons to adjust the font, its size, color etc. That is where Performancing scores as of now.

Thanks for reading thus far. Have a great weekend ahead.

technorati tags:flock, firefox, rss, flickr

Blogged with Flock

Google Notebook and Web ToolKit launched

Without much fanfare, Google has launched Google Notebook. I have been playing around with it for a while now, and I must say that it looks like a well conceived idea. I really loved the mini Notebook that lives inside the browser window.

Google Notebook can act as a single storage place for all your bookmarks, notes and other snippets.

You can learn more about it at the Google Notebook overview page, and here is a first look by Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped. His sample notebook is also available.

Now, whether we will switch over from delicious (now owned by Yahoo) to Google Notebook is something that will take a longer time to answer. It depends on how the notebook evolves. Anyway, here is my notebook.

Google has also launched the Google Web Toolkit to make the life of Ajax Developers easy. I would appreciate if you can check it out and blog about it, Apple. Is it just hype or really useful?

Are you NOT using RSS yet?

“Let the information come to you instead of [you] actively searching for it.” — From the introduction to RSS by LoadAverageZero.

I have been thinking of posting about the greatness of RSS [acronym for Really Simple Syndication] and how it has completely changed the way I browse for about 4 months now (believe me!). I just couldn’t motivate myself to write about this thing which might or might not be useful to everyone.

But today I got the bit of inspiration I was looking for. One of my friends who is extremely busy these days, send in this by mail today:

“…are u updating the blog? Tell me if i would get a mail after u update…”

This triggered off a train of actions that ultimately resulted in this post.

OK, having got the why this post part out of the way, let me get down to explaining what this fuss is all about. RSS is a three letter acronym that stands for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. Whatever, it is, all we should be worrying about is how to harness the power of RSS.

But, at least some of you might be interested in knowing a bit more about RSS. So please this post by Dan Read of DeveloperDotStar first, where he touches upon the beauty of RSS and how useful it is, and after that links you to this simple intro to RSS posted at LoadAverageZero. However, there is a much simpler and more layman-ish intro available at the BBC Feedfactory site.

So go, first read Dan’s post followed by either of those two intros. Till then I will wait, I promise.

Ok, now that you know how simple RSS is — it is just an XML file — you need to know how to harness its power.

There are special (and simple) software available that can make sense of all this XML stuff being spewed out by the various sources, including BBC and DeveloperDotStar. For this, we use something called as a News-Aggregator or a News-Reader, of which there are two kinds — desktop and web-based.

The basic tasks of a feed reader will be to:

• Keep track of the news and blogs you are interested in
• Highlight the entries you are yet to read
• Have a way to link to the original post for each entry

The desktop reader is a simple application that you can download and install in your PC, that will keep track of all the emerging news and blog posts. There are also special plug-ins available that can be added onto either Outlook or Firefox (Sage) to do the same thing. This avoids the use of an external application (other than your browser and/or mail client). Another cute way of achieving the same is to use the mail client Mozilla Thunderbird that has a built-in news aggregator.

The disadvantage of this approach would be that if you are using more than one PC to browse the web (say one at work and one back home as I am doing), then these two versions will not be in sync. So you won’t be able to easily find out what all feeds you have already read.

This is where the web-based version comes to our rescue. Here you login to a site — just like logging into your mail account — that keeps track of your feeds for you. The best among the desktop version would be Bloglines, Rojo and Google Reader. I am using Google Reader for about 5 months now though it is still in Beta.

There is a another class of web based aggregators emerging now, that offers much more than just aggregating your feeds. These are popularly known as a web-desktop. The best among the lot would be Netvibes, closely followed by Google Personalised Home, PageFlakes, My Yahoo, MSN Live and countless others.

But of this lot, I prefer Netvibes, which I am using for about 4 months now. I use it to track the feeds, but prefer doing the actual reading in Google Reader.

So, in a nutshell, RSS is all about letting the info come to you rather than actively searching for it, as mentioned in that LoadAverageZero intro.

I really would appreciate if you can comment about the usability of this article. That will help me in improving my posts in future. Thanks for reading thus far.

Postscript: Yes, I am going to mail my friend that I have posted an entry. But I just hope this will be the last time I will be doing so :).