I’m no developer, but I do love previewing nifty beta software and Flock certainly qualifies under the category “nifty.”

I’m actually creating this post within Flock using the “Create a Blog Post” button within the browser. Getting Flock setup to interoperate with the blog was actually quite painless and only took about a minute. The same thing goes for it’s “Star” feature.

The Star button lives just to the left of the URL bar and allows you to “bookmark” a page instantly to your del.icio.us account with one click. I had to configure this feature the first time as well, but it was also just as easy.

The other things I’m digging about Flock:

  1. Tabbed browsing
    Every next-gen, Web 2.0 browser has to have it.
  2. Search Engine Integration.
    Just like Firefox you can add search boxes to the top of the browser. Defaults: Yahoo!, Google, Amazon, eBay, Technorati, Wikipedia - in that order.
  3. Feed icons
    I like that feed icons appear in the URL bar after the URL. Much more intuitive than Firefox.
  4. Flickr Topbar
    I love the integration of your Flickr account in their Blog editor. All you provide is a Username and Flock grabs your photos for easy blogging.
  5. The Shelf
    I haven’t used this feature yet, but it’s the same concept I use when tagging URLs as “toblog” in del.icio.us

Overall, I think Flock might just be the perfect browser for share-minded folks.  Bloggers, Podcasters, Vloggers and Shutterbugs will all love it, especially when a stable version is available.

UPDATE: Because Flock is using the Weblog Meta API to post to my blog, it’s written some, in my opinion, junky code. Just cleaning things up a bit.

Download the Flock Developer Preview if you want to play along at home.