Flocking del.icio.us

I’ve been getting into some Ruby on Rails of late, and in the process of hunting down some information on incorporating PayPal IPN support I stumbled across a post on Tom Wilcoxen’s blog about Flock. I got sidetracked about having an integrated browser/blogger, and it’s shifted my browsing into a much nicer place to be.

was something I’ve been meaning to try, especially since Josh has pointed it out to me a few times.

To me, del.icio.us bookmarking has a good solid value proposition:

1. It ensures my bookmarks are available anywhere
2. Tags. Although they’re essentially analogous to the folders that IE uses for categorising bookmarks, they have an important semantic difference. They allow items to occupy more than one. They are also key to the powering of benefit 3 below. From a user experience point-of-view it’s important that you don’t need to create the folders first (as you would through IEs boomark support), they’re created when you bookmark. Something that now I think about it, almost every other bookmark feature gets the wrong way round.
3. Shared and social. Through tagging I can discover other related bookmarks, people that seem to be reading the same kind of things I am, and browse things they find interesting. Cross-selling for information.

In short it’s great. But, previously it just wasn’t integrated enough for my liking. Despite there being a couple of ways of making it quicker and easier to use when I’m browsing around, I wanted something more complete. So as soon as I remembered reading that Flock integrated del.icio.us for it’s bookmarking I decided to give it a go

Flock’s now my browser of choice. Although I’ve used Firefox, I never bought it as a fundamental replacement from IE, I just don’t buy a lot of the commentary about it being downright more secure than IE. I’d like to think I have enough Internet know-how to avoid killing my computer through browsing to malicious places. Flock adds value to my browsing experience, it integrates blog posting (although in a somewhat rudimentary way) such that I can blog in just 2 clicks on content I find. It includes a Shelf that I can place interesting things that I don’t necessarily want to bookmark, just come back to at some point.

So, if you want some joined-up browsing fun, get flock.

Incidentally, you should also note the addition of a my del.icio.us section on the right sidebar – this updates automatically with stuff I’ve bookmarked. If you want, you can even subscribe to an RSS feed of my bookmarks. How neat is that?