Flock may be losing its steam to Firefox

Recently both Flock and Firefox released a new version of their browser product, namely Flock 2.5 and Firefox 3.5. While both browsers are based the Gecko engine, Firefox 3.5 is certainly beating Flock 2.5 in terms of performance.

My default browser used to be Flock, a social web browser that has built-in support for many popular web sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Del.icio.us. But, when Firefox 3.5 becomes available, with its latest support for HTML 5, a faster JavaScript engine, the awesome bar and the Personas extension,  I immediately switched.

Before I had switched, I was worried that I will missed the integrated social web browsing experience provided by Flock. But, after I had installed various Firefox plugins for Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Blogger, I didn't feel losing much functionality. A faster browsing experience is what I loved about Firefox.

I'm worried about the future of Flock. I wonder if it has become a bloatware.

Twitter increases TechCrunch web traffic

There is a new trend in social media. Tweets, messages posted on Twitter, may soon replace RSS feeds as a major source of web traffic. TechCrunch recently released its web traffic statistics. Excluding direct hits, after Google, Twitter is the number two source of referral site that drives visitors TechCrunch. I'm very surprised!

Top Sources of Traffic To TechCrunch

1. Google: 32.7%
2. Direct: 22.7%
3. Twitter: 9.7%
4. Digg: 7.4%
5. Techmeme: 2.4%
6. Other: 25.1%

According the author, TechCrunch tweets (messages that contain web links to TechCrunch articles) are becoming valuable link currency for the site. In the past, people follow news through RSS feeds. Today people follow news through Twitter.

Personally I haven't given up Google Reader as the tool for reading news on the web, and I only use Twitter infrequently to catch up real-time event updates. Maybe one day I will switch to Twitter for reading news when more effective tools were developed for this purpose.