Round Two, sponsor of well-known Firefox extensions such as the Tabbrowser Extension, FlashGot, TinyURL Creator, and several others, has released its first private beta of Flock, a unified social networking tool, for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.

I spoke to Round Two CEO Bart Decrem last week, and he told me that he and his team of programmers have been working well into the night every night on coding. Apparently I have underestimated the value of alcohol in coding, as it looks like it was present in abundance throughout the marathon coding sessions.

I was fortunate enough to be invited to try the first private beta of Flock, numbered 0.1, and even while working around and through the many bugs present in a very early product, I managed to find myself impressed. I was able to successfully post to this site using Flock yesterday.

Flock is capable of posting to many blogging systems, including Blogger, Movable Type and WordPress, using a WYSIWYG interface. It uses XML-RPC to communicate with the blogs. It organizes all of your blogs in a single unified interface and allows you to read and edit your posts, as well as making new posts. In addition, it integrates into your Flickr photo collection and allows you to easily insert photos into your posts. I haven’t played much with the Flickr integration, as I don’t have a Flickr account yet. I’ll have to rectify that.

Flock also includes “breadcrumbs,” a link tagging system similar to del.icio.us but which goes a little beyond it. Flock’s breadcrumbs are deeply integrated into Firefox. The simple “+” icon in the Firefox toolbar lets you immediately add whatever page you’re looking at. You can also browse the most frequently tagged links directly from your toolbar, browse links that your friends have tagged, or browse all links with a particular tag. With breadcrumbs being integrated directly into a blog posting and image management tool, the possibilities look bright indeed.

I’m looking forward to the further development of the Flock. It promises to change both blogging and social networking on the Internet as we know it, by making both much more accessible and fun. At this time the beta is not open to the public, but you can sign up to be notified when it is available, or if you’re lucky, to be invited to a future private beta.