Yesterday I downloaded and fired up the Flock 1.1 release. What is Flock? Flock is a Firefox-based browser aimed toward the social-networking butterfly in all of us. But it’s much more than that. How much more? Let’s find out.

The Flock project has been building a "social Web browser" since 2005. The upcoming Flock 0.9 release adds new blogging features, integrates media streams into the browser, and includes an overhaul of the Flock bookmark system. It's not perfect yet, but Flock 0.9 is a big leap forward.

"I’m pleased to announce the release of Flock 0.9.1 less than 70 days after the launch of 0.9. Today's upgrade to Flock includes over two hundred bug fixes and feature enhancements..."

Shawn Hardin, President and Chief Executive Officer of Flock, has announced the release of version 2.5 of the Flock social web browser based on Firefox 3. Flock automatically manages updates and media from several popular social services, including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Digg, YouTube and Twitter.

When we looked at Flock 0.9 last year, the social Web browser showed a lot of potential. Now that it's over the 1.0 hump, the Flock team has made good on the application's promise. Maybe too good -- while Flock serves up a lot of content on a single page, you practically need super-powers to take it all in.

"Get ready to meet your favorite browser! " Flock 2 tells me at the end of its installation process. Ok Flock, I'm ready. Blow me away!
Sadly, I'm immediately greeted by a cheesey stick figure flash intro to the new features. What the hell am I getting myself into?

"...Flock is preparing for a very important milestone in our company’s history. We are on the cusp of completing Flock 1.0, which integrates your friends from your favorite social services into the browser, paving the way for easy communication and sharing with people you care about, no matter where you are on the Web. This is by no means a modest ambition..."

Flock is essentially Firefox with a handful of highly focused extensions built in to let you connect with social services like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and others. We think Flock 1.0, which is now in public beta, offers a fantastic browsing experience that brings you the best of Firefox with a few tweaks that prove to be exceptionally helpful.

Flock, the social Web browser built on Mozilla Firefox is now out of beta and can be integrated with the MySpace Data Availability platform.