Online social networks are extremely popular, making it easier for people to get together and find others that have the same passions, goals and, obviously, the social sites are also a very good advertising channel. Based on Mozilla's Firefox, Flock is called a "social browser", and that's not without a reason, and since version 1.0.5 was released today, I think it's the right time to tell you a few things about it...

First of all, a question needs to be answered - why did they call Flock a "social browser"? Well, its somehow unique ability to interact with popular social networking web services is the main reason. Just think about this - with Flock, you can easily post news to your blog, check your RSS feeds or your Flickr, Facebook, Del.icio.us or Photobucket account!

Apart from saving bookmarks on your computer, you can add them to your del.icio.us or ma.gnolia account, so if your PC blows up, no problem - your bookmarks will survive!

When it comes to blogging, Flock has support for 6 notorious services, including Blogger, LiveJournal and WordPress.com, but you can also setup a self-hosted blog in a matter of minutes!(it worked with my WordPress-based blog, so don't blame me if it doesn't work with yours)

Just as Firefox, Flock's feature set can be extended using add-ons, and exactly as its ancestor, Flock is available for Mac, Windows and Linux users. Being free to download and use, Flock can be downloaded from this page.

As I was predicting here, Vista's first service pack, although not yet available, may help it rise or fall, but latest reports made me see the reality is slightly different. No matter what I or other people may think, it seems Vista is going to replace XP for good, and the only questions remaining is "how fast?"...


A lot of bad things have been said about Vista so far, and most of them are not lies, but Bill Gates seems to consider it the best Windows OS so far, and the industry should take this into account. After all, the Windows peripherals and software market is huge, and as soon as official support for XP is going to stop, software producers will start releasing Vista-only products.

According to information from Dell's Outlet Center, it seems that while 70% of the small businesses go for Windows XP, only 7% of the consumers still choose it over Vista, but there's one thing that I don't think most people considered... As a corporate user, you can order a batch of 100 laptops and ask your system integrator to deliver them with Windows XP preinstalled, while for consumers, it gets harder and harder to find computers that come with anything else preinstalled then Vista.

Expectations are that Vista will become what XP is now, the operating system that users wow to use until their computers blow up, but is there enough time for this to happen until Microsoft releases Windows 7? Just think about this - while DirectX 10 has been on the market for more than a year, being one of the reasons that made a lot of gamers upgrade to Vista, serious DirectX 10 games that run decently on mid-end systems are nowhere to be seen yet...

At last, we shouldn't forget that, in some areas, businesses and home-users started to switch from Windows to Linux, and despite the fact this is only a drop in an ocean, the future will show us if this was a drop of acid, or simply dilluted water...

As time passes and Vista gets closer to its first service pack, the applications built for tweaking it are getting new versions too. One of them comes from Yamicsoft, and it's called Vista Manager. The reason I am writing this is the fact that Vista Manager got version 1.4.1 released less than a day ago, and if you haven't heard of it already, this is a good moment for that...

There are 7 tasks that Vista Manager takes care of - providing information, tweaking your system, cleaning the junk from your computer, customizing all aspects of your Vista OS, improving security, network settings and it also comes with a bunch of built in utilities for helping you to perform timed system shutdowns or retrieve your Windows/Office keys.

Available for both Vista 32 and 64 bit, Vista Manager is priced at $39.95, but free trial versions are also available. The 32 bit trial can be downloaded from here, and the one for the 64 bit version of Vista can be retrieved here.