The first step was a new Web 2.0 Browser! That is a browser with social web tools built in. I found Flock first and installed it. Great browser with feeds from Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and Twitter. It was a whole new experience and, I know this is going to be hard to believe, not as distracting as you might think.
The issue is that this past week, April 12th 2011, I got the announcement that they were closing up shop as of April 26th. They recommended going to Firefox or Chrome as replacements for Flock. I was not happy. Then in a posting on Mashable.com which announced the Flock heading south there was a mention of RockMelt.
My initial reaction was to recall a joke or skit I had seen decades ago where Cher was asked why she had named her kid Chastity. She replied that all the good names were taken. I downloaded and installed it anyway.
Hooking it up to my Facebook, Twitter and blog feeds was easy and now they all appear as tiny tiles in a narrow 30 pixel or so wide column on the right side of the browser. Little numbers appear on the tiles tellig me the number of new items each feed has available. It reminds me of the live tiles on my Windows Phone. A great way to navigate.
The left side shows all of my friends available to chat through Facebook live chat. I can set my chat to offline so they can't see that I am online and distract me but I can still see that they are available.
The browser itself is based on the Google Chrome Engine so my Diigo and Delicious plug ins work too. Not a bad deal at all and definitely worth a look.
www.rockmelt.com
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