There’s always room for innovation in the world of open source. For example, Firefox is an awesome web browser, it too can be improved — or at least serve as the basis for further experimentation. Indeed, some enterprising developers have done just that, using Firefox as a jumping off point to create a new browser named Flock that incorporates all of the cool social software that’s appeared over the last few years.
What’s social software? There are several different definitions, but Clay Shirky, one of the gurus in the field, defines it as “software that supports group interaction.” In other words, any software that encourages people to interact and share with others falls under the rubric. (To find out more, check out the syllabus for a course on social software at http://www.granneman.com/go/socialsoftware.)
You can download the latest version of Flock from http://www.flock.com/developer/. It’s very early-stage software, so it may crash, lose data, and forget to feed your cat. There are downloads for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. The download is bundled as a tarball (a gzip- compressed tar file), so you’ll need to save it, untar with tar zxvf filename, and then move the resulting flock folder where you want it to reside, perhaps /opt/,/usr/local/, or even your own ~/bin directory. Assuming that you move it to /opt/, you…
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