Later this month, Flock Inc.—a startup running from a garage across the street from Stanford University—will release the Flock web browser.

Are those yawns I hear? Another browser? Firefox rocks, Microsoft is beta testing IE7 to some pretty glowing reviews, Opera still commands a loyal following…is there really room for yet another web browser?

Well, yes, particularly since all of the browsers currently on the market do pretty much the same thing. The differences—tabbed browsing, integrated RSS capabilities, better or worse degrees of security—are simply refinements of the decade-old notion of rendering web pages on your computer monitor. Flock is the first browser built with the rapidly expanding world of social media and consumer-generated content in mind.

Writing in BusinessWeek’s “Tech Beat,” Steve Hamm explains what makes Flock a “social browser:”

It offers features designed to make it easier to blog, tag content, and share photographs. When a user lands on a Web page that she or he finds interesting, and wants to post about it on their blog, they simply right click on their mouse, which pulls up a blogging wizard. In the process, the software automatically adds citations and links. The browser also has an RSS feed built in. Other handy features: an open-source search engine that automatically indexes every Web site a user visits for easy rediscovery, and the ability to easily share bookmarks with friends.

I’ve signed up to give it a try. With luck, I’ll get onto the beta list and report on how well it works.