Last week my friend Chris challenged me to try out a new web browser for a week. The browser is called Flock and it's available as a free download for Mac or PC.

Based on the popular Firefox browser, Flock takes the next step with keeping users constantly connected to their favorite social media. Whether you're into Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Hulu, MySpace (for real?), or any other social networking site, Flock has a way to keep it in your face at all times. To get started you just open Flock and enter your various usernames and passwords for sites you want to stay connected to. Flock adds these to a sidebar that displays updates from all of your friends, recently added pictures and video, or even just links to news stories. You'll also get a home page with a more detailed view of all this info (see the screenshot below).

There are a couple of things I really liked about Flock: it was really easy to connect to my various networks, eveyone's updates are aggregated into the same feed, and grabbing an RSS feed or media stream from a page was simple and quick. On the other side though, all of this constantly-updating information is a huge distraction. I'd log on to check my email and spend 30 minutes on Facebook, or I'd start to check my bank account only to find 10 new stories about a soon-to-be-released video game. While I wasn't particularly productive while on Flock, I always knew what everyone else was up to.

The one thing that really bugged me was that the default search was set to Yahoo. Now, I don't want to get into a "religious" discussion here, but let's just say that I generally prefer Google 100% of the time. However, a quick search (on Google) revealed that Flock is endorsed by Yahoo.

Long story short, Flock is great if you love social media. Why don't you take the challenge: try out Flock for a week and let me know what you think!

This post was originally written by Jeff for his company blog at GreenLite Web Solutions. It has been modified slightly from its original version.

The US Federal government has recently launched the new website Recovery.gov to help the general population understand how the money from the recently signed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is being spent.

The first thing I noticed about Recovery.gov is that it's built with Drupal, the same open-source technology that I have been using to build websites (including the one that you're looking at right now)! To me, this is a positive sign that our new president actually understand how technology can be utilized for the benefit of the American public. Recovery.gov and the new Whitehouse.gov website mark a new (and much needed) era of public government information transparency.

Kudos to the new Obama administration for making the web a better place.

Google Analytics is an amazingly in-depth, full-featured, and best of all free web application.

In case you're unfamiliar, Google Analytics tracks the number of hits that your website gets. But beyond that, it organizes the data into many meaningful categories that provide a detailed snapshot of who is visiting your site and how they're getting there.

My personal favorite is the map overlay. You can start by seeing how many hits per country your site is getting in a user-friendly interactive map. Clicking on a country brings you in closer - in the case of the United States, you get a state-by-state breakdown of website visits. Clicking on any state then gives you a breakdown by city! Geo-targeting, here we come.

There are a multitude of other features and even some customizable options. It's pretty easy to set up, too; especially with Drupal, which has a downloadable Google Analytics module.

All you need to get started is a (free) Gmail account - try it out at google.com/analytics.