Flock Evolves, Announces Public Launch

If you haven’t heard about Flock yet, check out this Wired story and our profile of Flock from August 26, 2005.

It is still in private beta, although you can request a beta invitation on their home page. Not sure of your chances though.

Chris Messina sent out an email to Flock beta testers yesterday announcing that they are moving from beta 0.2 to 0.5 and making some product changes.

Social Bookmarks (they call it “Breadcrumbs”) are being phased out after a lukewarm response from testers, and they will be adding new functionality. They’ve also announced that Flock will be publicly available sometime in October:

We’re going to be phasing out our online breadcrumb service and replacing it with a couple more… established options. Oh, and don’t worry, we’ll make sure you can take your existing breadcrumbs with you. So in the meantime, keep posting to our service, but know that we’ll be shutting its doors come November 1. Questions? Just let us know.

So back to the next release. Let me first say that we’re all very excited about the ideas we’re baking into Flock 0.5. Second, we’re set to launch something public in October! So between this Friday
and then, we’re going to need lots of intrepid testers to pound on our stuff and let us know what works, what’s broken, what you like and what you can’t stand.

I must say I’m even more impressed with Flock – it is a very bold move to simply drop functionality that must have hundreds of developer hours behind it. They are obviously serious about listening to beta feedback and building an exceptional product.

Chris also pointed to flickr pictures of the flock office and people taken by Flocker Lloyd Budd.