Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Picasa in for Flock 1.1

Flock has released Flock 1.1 Beta, a development version for testers and enthusiasts, featuring a few more web services.

Google’s Picasa online photo sharing service, is now available for search and subscription through Flock’s media bar just like Facebook, Flickr and several others already available with Flock 1.0.

An even more interesting and welcomed addition is integration with Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. A new mail button in the Flock toolbar notifies when new mail has arrived and opens a menu of added accounts when clicked. A submenu displays the number of unread messages and even the subject of the first few messages for each account which you can click to read it in a new tab.

Yahoo! Mail account menus also include an ugly and unfortunate offer to upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus, I guess as part of its partnership with Yahoo!.

For complete integration, mailto: links are handled by your webmail account defined as primary which you can set through the web mail account’s menu.

Note that by default, a “Shared with Flock” tag is automatically added to new web mail messages. To deactivate it, open the Options window, in the Advanced page, Sharing tab, uncheck Include “Shared with Flock” text when sharing content.

Finally, a new Friend Activity widget is now available for Flock’s home page, My World. As its name suggests, it provides a quick view of what your friends are doing in any of the supported social networks.

Some interesting features here that will definitely please Flock users.

Download Flock 1.1 Beta, available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.