The future is in apps you don’t open.
“We’re going to move away from the era of ‘I have hundreds of apps but never think of using them’ towards ‘I have these cool apps and they take care of me’”. This is David Lieb, co-founder and CEO of Bump, on the sea change in design philosophy that underpins Pay With Square and his company’s new photos apps Flock.
It centers around the idea that… → Read More
Photos save our memories, yet fumbling to upload them can cut those moments short. But Flock lets you snap and forget, and then later collects photos from you and friends you were with into privately shared albums. Flock for iOS combines brilliant social design with the underutilized photo location API to simplify sharing. Instead of clumsily selecting privacy settings, it suggests you share with… → Read More
Flock, the social browser we had high hopes for back in March 2005, is officially in the deadpool today with a gone fishing note attached to its website. The note reads:
“Support for Flock browsers will be discontinued as of April 26th, 2011. We would like to thank our loyal users around the world for their support, and we encourage the Flock community to migrate in the coming weeks to one of the… → Read More
Zynga is acquiring Flock, a beleaguered startup founded in 2005 by Bart Decrem and Geoffrey Arone, we’ve confirmed. The deal should be announced shortly.
The company has raised nearly $30 million in venture capital, although the last round was closed in 2008. We do not know the terms of the acquisition. Both Google and Twitter were also bidding for Flock, we’ve heard from one source – perhaps to… → Read More
Flock, the social Web browser company, has released a new and completely different version of its desktop browser client after nearly a year of silence. The news comes about a week after Apple released Safari 5 and around the same time Opera launched a beta version of its upcoming Opera 10.60 browser.
In a perhaps surprising twist, Flock is moving away from Mozilla technology after 6 years and … → Read More
Marc Andreessen is backing a new browser company called RockMelt. Not much is known about RockMelt other than it is being designed by an all-star team (including software engineer Robert John Churchill from the Netscape days) and that it is tied into Facebook through Facebook Connect. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a screenshot of the sign-in page and speculates that RockMelt is in… → Read More
Flock, a social-focused browser startup that has raised nearly $30 million in venture funding, has ceased building on top of the open source Firefox browser, say multiple sources. The next version of the Flock browser will be built on Google’s open source Chrome browser platform. The last version of Flock was released in October 2008.
Flock first launched in October 2005 and has had 6 million or… → Read More
Design philosophies could hardly be further apart. Google’s ironically named Chrome browser, which launched last month, advanced the notion that browsers ought to be neither seen nor heard. Like operating systems, they should sit obediently in the background and make sure that the applications on top of them run quickly, reliably and safely.
Flock has always taken the opposite approach… → Read More
Flock, the so-called “social browser” built on top of Mozilla technology, has raised $15 million in a Series D round led by Fidelity Ventures and joined by Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, and Shasta Ventures. The round (the company’s biggest) more than doubles its total to over $28 million, an amount that has been gradually raised over the past three years even… → Read More
When Netscape announced they were shuttering their iconic Internet browser last month, they recommended to users that they consider moving over to Firefox: “We recommend that you download Mozilla Firefox and give it a try. We know you’ll enjoy it!” (they also gave instructions for migrating from Netscape to Firefox). That makes sense, since Mozilla spun out of Netscape… → Read More
Flock 1.0 (production version) is now available for download. Some reports have suggested that many of the Flock tweaks to the underlying Firefox engine were designed specifically to provide a more stable browsing experience; in the couple of weeks I’ve been using it, Flock hasn’t crashed once, where as I had grown so sick of Firefox crashing I had switched to using Safari. If… → Read More
Flock 1.0 beta has been released for public download and is available here (at the time of writing it’s not shown on the front page). The new version of Flock, the first full release was first demonstrated at the TechCrunch 40 conference in September. The new version builds on previous Flock versions by offering a variety of social networking tie-ins. I’ve been hard on Flock in the… → Read More
Session three as follows, including our live notes. Story Blender Story Blender is an online collaborative video production platform where people can work together to “blend” their content into a new multimedia show. StoryBlend’s online editing tool lets users create videos by “blending” images, sound, text, and video clips. When users have created new video blends… → Read More
Mozilla has released details on The Coop, a new product that will incorporate social networking features directly into the Firefox browser. This is not good news for the privately-backed social browser Flock (also built on Mozilla), which is yet to release a 1.0 version of its browser. Many of the proposed features and some of the mockups created by Mike Beltzner (see above) suggest a significant… → Read More
A year ago I wrote a post called “Web 2.0 Companies I Couldn’t Live Without” and listed thirteen startups whose products made a real impact in my life. Those were the products that I loved, and used every day. I enjoyed sorting through the hundreds of startups that we had written about, and picking just a handful that made a real impact on my life. It was so much fun, actually, that… → Read More
San Francisco based Piczo, a social network for young teenagers, continues to add 35,000 new registered users per day, and claims 2 billion monthly page views. We first covered them back in September, where we compared them with the other major social networks. The UK continues to be Piczo’s biggest market, accounting for 40% of users and 50% of page views (see TechCrunch UK coverage of the… → Read More
In a blog post yesterday, Flock’s Mike Dosik announced that they will no longer support the Shadows bookmarking service (Shadows is a product of Pluck) in the upcoming Flock 2.0 release. A number of angry Flock users commented on the post, wanting to know why. Co-founder Geoffrey Arone stepped in with an explanation: “Shadows is owned by the Pluck Corporation, who is doing quite well… → Read More
Photobucket, a very popular photo sharing service, is now distributing a custom version of the Flock Mozilla-based browser. A tour of the photo features of the browser is here. This comes less than a month after the release of the first public beta version of Flock (reviewed here). The Photobucket version of the Flock browser is identical to the one available at flock.com, except that Flickr… → Read More
A UK developer who goes by “Tones” has created a Flock-specific extension that puts Meebo, and therefore Yahoo, AIM, Gtalk and MSN IM, directly into a sidebar in the Flock browser (the extension also works for Firefox). Since Flock and Meebo are two startups I use, this looked interesting. I’ve downloaded the extension and tried it out. It works as promised, although it requires… → Read More
It’s been nearly eight months since Silicon Valley based Flock released a developer version of its Firefox based browser. This evening they are releasing their first public beta version, available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines, at Flock.com. I’ve been running the most recent developer release on my Mac for the last few weeks and it is now my browser of choice. I interviewed the… → Read More
Flock has gotten a lot of criticism lately. The reason for this particular round of naysaying is the launch of the impressive Performancing Firefox plugin that allows extremely easy blogging, from Firefox, for WordPress, MovableType or Blogger. Performancing is getting extremely good reviews from top bloggers like Paul Kedrosky, Om Malik and Steve Rubel. But the attacks didn’t start with the… → Read More
I just heard from Geoffrey Arone at Flock that they will be launching it to the general public within 3 hours (by 5 pm PST). Feedback to their recent beta expansion has been so positive, Geoffrey tells me, that there is no reason to delay any longer. Congratulations Flock! I imagine tens of thousands of people will be downloading and using their product by end of day. Make sure you upload your… → Read More
Flock‘s CEO Bart Decrem expanded the beta over the weekend to 1,007 people, most of whom are now blogging about it. The product, which was good back in August when I first tested it, is even better today. I’m a big supporter of Flock. I am even writing this post while wearing a Flock tshirt. Flock is definitely the Flickr of browsers. The three most powerful tools Flock offers… → Read More
Here’s the second set of companies that presented at the Web 2.0 conference Launchpad workshop. See Part 1 here. Zvents My friend Ethan Stock showed off Zvents, which launched last night. We’ve written about zvents here and here. In a nutshell, Zvents helps you create and locate the tens of thousands of monthly local events and has tons of awesome ajax, tagging and other web2.0 stuff. → Read More
I met with Geoffrey Arone and Chris Messina at Flock headquarters in Palo Alto yesterday to see the new Flock browser. Flock is expanding the beta group from a hundred or so individuals to a couple of thousand today. We begged a beta invitation to Flock a while back and wrote about it in a profile written on August 26, 2005 There have been significant improvements since then. The blogging tool is… → Read More
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… → Read More
Company: Flock Launched: in private beta Status: Funded/Incubated by Bessemer Venture Partners Location: Palo Alto Overview Flock is a new browser, built on top of firefox. It is a functional browser with excellent features (including firefox features like tabbed browsing, etc.). What really makes is stand out are two additional features they’ve added to build social networking directly into… → Read More
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