Much excitement is building around Flock, a new "social" internet browser that is in development.
BBC Newsnight's Paul Mason did an interesting package on Flock last night, talking to the people behind it at BarCamp Amsterdam, a bring-your-sleeping bag, word-of-mouth meeting of open source software innovators.
The philosophy behind Flock is about making interaction with web pages much easier. As Mason says:
For the first decade of web browsing it's been just like that: you can read web pages, but only if there are special add-ons can you interact with them. Now somebody has launched a web browser that is designed to let you write to the web just as easily as you read it.
One of the creators of Flock showed Mason, a former editor of Computer Weekly, how easy it could be to copy a photograph from one website and paste it into another.
A preview version of Flock has already gone live, though the creators admit it is "not for the faint-hearted".
It has won a mixed response from bloggers so far, but many are certainly watching its development closely.
Rob Hof, of the technology blog on Business Week, says it offers "nice tools for blogging", such as a very easy way to add Flickr photos. He says that it may not become his main browser, but that this does not matter as he does not need any single one to be perfect and he "always has at least two browsers open anyway".
This morning, the word flock was the fifth most popular search on Technorati, but many of the results had nothing to do with the new browser and some went through to references about sheep. A polished version of Flock that lived up to its hype would certainly change that.
