Take the Favorites, for example.

It's similar to the Bookmarks you've got in Firefox, with a lot more functionality.

It's integrated with del.icio.us for example (if you want it to be), and you can choose to have it synched there. That's pretty cool.

You can "Star" pages (add them to your favorites), or you can "Star and Tag" them.

This allows you to add tags and a description to each page you "Star". You can then enable del.icio.us integration and your favorites will be added automatically.

Flock also has an in-browser tag-based archive and list you can browse. I think this is a neat way to manage your bookmarks.

The integrated blog feature looks pretty nice and useful as well. I couldn't get it to work as intended, and my guess is it's not entirely finished; however, it does seem to be on the right track and with more and more blogs popping up every day, this might be the feature that propels Flock into the mainstream.

Flock's inline feedreader works very much like the latest version of Safari and seems good enough.

It's fairly easy to understand and use and might be attractive to quite a few people out there.

One feature that really stood out to me was the "shelf".

It's kind of like a browsing clipboard. You can drag text and images onto it, and it'll hold them there for later use.

This is great for someone who does browsing for research, for example.

It also has nice Flickr support and some unique takes on things such as integrated search where you can not only search Google, but Yahoo!, Technorati and more.

All in all, it's a very interesting experience that has a fairly wide appeal.

Flock vs. Firefox

So what does it mean in larger terms? How will it stack up against Firefox?

Well, that remains to be seen. At its most basic level, Flock really kind of is Firefox, only a specialized version of it.

It may seem at first glance that Flock is too specialized for a mainstream browsing audience; however, a long look might reveal that some of its features (integrated blogging, Flickr support) might actually appeal to a more general audience and help bring memes like social bookmarking even further into the limelight.

I'm very excited to see how Flock matures and the effect it has on the Web and some of these new technologies.

If nothing else, I know I'd be interested in using it, and I've a feeling there are many people out there who will find its features interesting and useful.

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