Flock 0.9 Beta is Public
I have been on the Flock 0.9 Beta for a few months now (since it was released). I have been using Flock since it was at version 0.7 and this latest update is a significant improvement. Aside from the update to the Firefox 2 engine, it has significant updates to the UI and better integration of social services.
Flock 0.9 has increased awareness of the social tools it can connect to by increasing discoverability when you are browsing sites that integrate with Flock. For instance, if you are on Flickr, and you mouse over a photo, you will see a Flock icon appear with options to view the Photostream in your mini bar, blog it, or email it to someone. Whenever you login to a service or application that Flock can interact with, Flock will ask if you want to turn that service on.
The Media Bar has been part of Flock for a while. Prior to 0.9, it only supported photos. It now supports video as well, so you can now browse videos from YouTube and Truveo as well as photos from Flickr and Photobucket. It would be nice to see Media Bar support extended to other video services like Vimeo and Virb as well. The RSS Reader seems to be performing well, although I haven’t switched to it as my default reader yet.
The biggest addition to the new Flock release is the “My World” page. This is essentially a pre-defined start page that aggregates the social activity that Flock is tracking for you - Flickr, Favorites, RSS, etc. Of course there are tons of features that have been improved since Flock 0.7 and these are only a few. Check out the Flock 0.7 Versus 0.9 Beta Comparison chart to get a full overview of new features.
The best part is that now they have opened the beta up to the public. So if you tried Flock in the past and were unimpressed, give it another shot. If you are currently running Flock 0.7, it is suggested that backup your current profile before installing Flock 0.9. You can get all the details at the Flock Beta site.
