The philosophy behind Flock is more: more of everything, and all packed directly into the browser. This design has its upsides and its downsides; and one downside is immediately apparent: it's a memory hog. Well, maybe you have a fast computer and you won't notice; that's fine. But compared to Firefox and Chrome (and it's only logical, I'm not complaining here) Flock is simply slower and needs more memory to operate.
On the upside, you get more of everything right out of the box. The core of the Flock experience is social networking, and this is where Flock shines. Once you log in into various socnets (support for MySpace has been added in this version), its People sidebar holds essential info and lets you use certain features of the site without visiting it. It's done well; the amount of information may overwhelm you in the beginning, but you'll get used to it in no time.
With all this comes another potential downside, at least for me. As much as it sounds tempting to have everything you need inside the browser, I like to visit the actual websites - Facebook, MySpace, Twitter. Not only because it's my job and I need to see what's happening on the actual site, but also because I feel strangely disconnected if I never visit them. Some users probably won't care, but some, I reckon, will prefer to simply open their favorite socnets in a couple of tabs when they fire up their browser, skipping Flock's social networking features altogether.
It's not only about social networking, though. Flock now supports the Media RSS standard and features a media bar that holds "media streams" from sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Digg etc. Want to quickly fire up recent public photos posted to Flickr, or YouTube's top favorited videos? No problem.
Then there's the MyWorld feature, which is essentially Flock's idea of a start page. It brings together your favorite feeds, friend activity, and favorite media in a slick page; I don't see myself using it (I prefer my Netvibes), but for many users it'll be better than a simple Google search form or some standard Web portal such as MSN.com.