I found Flock productive and fun to use. I tested its special sidebar with my Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and YouTube accounts, and with my favorite news feeds. I also used another of Flock's features, which let me check my Gmail and Yahoo Web-mail accounts without navigating to their main pages. And I published several posts from within Flock to a test blog I maintain. All of this worked as promised.

Flock does a good job at the tasks it sets for itself...

By pre-populating a version of Flock with aggregated content targeting a particular interest group, for those users, the company is taking away the grudge work (and technical expertise) needed to benefit from RSS, whether it be in order to subscribe to pictures, text or video from a variety of sources. Instead, specific vertical content is conveniently bundled together into one neat little package, ready for consumption, and with Flock’s social features, sharing.

The new version is named Gloss and brings together Flock's browser technology with fashion and entertainment content from over 35 sources.

The skin isn’t the only thing that has changed. When you go digging into the RSS feeds and bookmarks you’ll see that they’ve already taken the liberty of populating them with the most popular fashion, celebrity news, lifestyle, shopping, and magazine websites from around the web.

By now we all know that Germany lost the EuroCup to Spain. To make up for some of the pain that Germans all over the world are feeling, Flock has launched a full German-language edition of their social browser. It's more than just a language translation - the browser is rich with German language content.

I'm most impressed by Flock, which shares Firefox's core, open-source technology. Though Flock is the least known of the alternatives, it is the strongest of the browsers I tested, smartly adapting to how people increasingly use the Internet for generating and sharing content. And with Firefox 3 as its core, Flock doesn't require you to choose one or the other.

If people start getting used to using Flock to keep up with their different social networking profiles and to share and discover media easier, I don’t see how they could ever go back to Internet Explorer or regular Firefox.

Most memorable acceptance speech: Browser start-up Flock picked up the judge-chosen Webby in the Social Networking category, and the company founder used his five words to say, "No s***, we beat Facebook!"

Flock, the creator of a “social Web browser” that is fast gaining traction among devotees of cutting-edge Internet technology, has scored another $15 million in fresh funding, the company announced Thursday.

I find myself seriously considering Flock as my main browser for the first time since it debuted in 2005. The Flock team built on Firefox 3 and got Flock 2 out in a surprisingly short amount of time, and having all these integrated social features at my fingertips with reliable, responsible performance is a breath of fresh browsing air. I tip my hat to the Flock team, as Flock 2 has already earned a place in my Dock.