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 recommended web browsers listed below. → 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 get Flock’s engineering talent, which is very highly regarded.
Flock first launched it’s social browser in 2005, and we wrote about it in August of that year. At the time, prior to Twitter and the rise of Facebook, “social” meant writing blogs and social bookmarking, and not much else. Flock was not a hit. → 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 making the switch to Chromium. Google will also become the default search engine.
Note: it’s only available for Windows today – a Mac version will be available later this summer. → 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 fact a Facebook browser. Miguel Helft at the NYT leans in that direction as well. It kind of makes sense since Andreesen is on the board of Facebook, but I suspect it is only half the story.
A Facebook browser, however, is a good metaphor for thinking about how browsers, in general, need to change. What would a Facebook browser look like? Well, to start with, you would be able to see updates from your friends on Facebook, share your own updates and media right from the browser, and perhaps IM with your friends through Facebook chat. While those set of features would be convenient, they are nothing revolutionary. Flock, which calls itself the social browser, already incorporates Facebook Connect (and Twitter and other social networks to boot), but it hasn’t taken off. And Facebook itself offers a toolbar for Firefox that lets you see notifications, search Facebook, and share links. There are plenty of other Firefox add-ons which incorporate Facebook features as well.
But the Facebook connection may just be the starting point for a much more ambitious piece of software. → 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 so downloads. But it still has less market share than even Netscape, which was discontinued over a year ago.
In the past Flock has said all it needs is a few tens of millions of users to score big dollars from the search engines (each active user generates $5 or so in search engine revenue). But after three years of trying, Flock hasn’t been able to achieve more than a fraction of that number of users. → 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, insisting that the browser should provide a lot of upfront functionality on its own, not fade out of sight. Tonight’s release of Flock 2.0 – which brings the Mozilla-based browser up-to-speed with Firefox 3 technology and adds new support for MySpace and media RSS – reasserts this notion by giving the browser an even higher level of visibility than before. → 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 though Flock 1.0 launched only this past November. CEO Shawn Hardin speaks about Flock’s mission in very sweeping terms: enabling users to express themselves, participate in online communities, have voices, and engage their peers. As he sees it, the web is experiencing a paradigm shift from consumption to participation, and it needs a new type of browser to go along with that shift. Flock is basically a suite of browser extensions with ties into web services like Facebook and Twitter. A personalized homepage called MyWorld and a special sidebar serve as feed readers and friend update aggregators. You’re given quick access to Gmail and Yahoo webmail accounts and any blogs that you administer. And a media bar along the top makes for quick searching on Flickr, YouTube, and other social media sites. When asked whether regular browser extensions pose much competition for Flock, Hardin suggests that very few people actually enjoy personalizing things enough to set up the breadth of functionality provided by Flock. Plus, Flock already has a proven revenue model where these do not; it earns money the same way Mozilla does, through search placement deals with the engines (Yahoo and a few others in Flock’s case). Almost 4 million people have downloaded Flock, and users are said to use it for over 4 hours per day on average. CrunchBase Information Flock Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 originally. Today, however, they split their endorsement. In a blog post titled “Netscape Recommends Flock, Too,” Netscape’s Richard Klein describes Flock as “Firefox with social integration” and gives it his thumbs up. The only problem is that Netscape has next to no actual users left to make these recommendations to – less than 1% market share. Flock must love the endorsement, but it isn’t going to make much of an impact on actual downloads. We’re fans of Flock here, too (Duncan gushes, whereas I think its excellent but very slow sometimes). Personally, I’m finding Firefox 3 for the Mac the best, fastest and most stable browser I’ve ever used. CrunchBase Information Flock Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 you’re having stability issues with Firefox it’s worth a look…the social networking features are good as well See our Flock 1.0 review here, and a video demo of Flock 1.0 at TechCrunch40 here. CrunchBase Information Flock Information provided by CrunchBase → 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 past, believing it to be nothing more than Firefox with a couple of fancy plugins. In some respects that was true (it’s based on Firefox code) but the new Flock offers something completely unique that for me at least makes it surprisingly very good. Facebook Comes To The Sidebar The big change to Flock is the introduction of sidebar social networking integration. Flock now comes standard with support for Facebook, Flickr (more so than previously), Twitter and YouTube. Facebook addicts will love the new Flock. Sidebar Facebook access is not dissimilar to the Facebook iPhone interface, but with better options including the ability to upload photos directly to Facebook. Some options do take you directly to Facebook itself, but it’s still very handy having them at your command in an easy to use sidebar. The Twitter app does a reasonable job and is not unlike the TwitBin Firebox plugin we have previously review, but like the Facebook app it comes with a better feature set, including action buttons allowing for direct messaging, profiles and nudging. My only gripe with the Twitter client is that it doesn’t update as frequently as Twitterrific and there was no obvious way of changing the update frequency that I could find. Account support is also available for Photobucket, Piczo, Del.icio.us and Magnolia. Media Bar The media bar is not new to Flock, but where as the service was previously focused on Flickr, Facebook support is now integrated, providing drag and drop uploads. Another feature Facebook addicts will love. Web Clipboard Flock now comes with what they call a “web clipboard” that allows users to drag and drop anything they see into it via the sidebar, including urls, text and images. The idea is that they can then be used when needed on other sites by drag and drop again, or via image upload as required. We’ve seen Firefox plugins before that do a similar job, but the way this is built into Flock does make it a more → 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 they can then share it with their friends and the StoryBlend community. Session 3 starts. CEO is also the founder of Cyworld. Online video mixing with friends, nice interface.Multi-level relationship model for contributions, friend of a friend sort of thing. Easy to use video mashing with lots of features TripIt TripIt is a travel organizer that helps do-it-yourself travelers manage their travel plans. Travelers manage their travel itinerary with TripIt by forwarding their purchase confirmation emails to the service. TripIt automatically creates master itineraries with travel plans and other critical information like weather, maps and driving directions, and destination information. You can print or access your itinerary from anywhere including online, in print and on their web-enabled mobile devices. They can also share itineraries and travel calendars and collaborate on planning trips with friends. CEO and Founder is ex-Hotwire, along with most of the team. TripIt wants to eliminate the vanilla travel folder, bringing the travel itinerary into the 21st century. Travel is an information management business, TripIt is not a booking service. Users send their plans to plans@tripit.com, compiles online itinerary, a sort of travel plan aggregation. TripIt supports export to iCal and other platforms, also looking at microformats Friends can share travel calenders. TripIt believes a multi-functional travel planner with collaborative tools will be a much needed service. Site is live today, out of beta. I’d like to see the site before I pass judgment, but in theory it’s a great idea. Flock Flock is a social web browser we have reported on extensively. With Flock, people can discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites. Flock is offering custom browser modifications as a revenue model. To date, Flock has shipped editions of its browser for Photobucket and Piczo. Flock feels that the browser has not evolved over time, and that’s a market opportunity for them. So interesting new features, Facebook sidebar was something new to me. Drag and drop functionality has improved a lot since earlier versions. I’ll be honest, → 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 overlap in the two products. In fact, Coop even has an example screen shot of Flock on the wiki page describing the product, along with the description “The design will likely resemble [formerly of Flock] Chris Messina’s mockup for “People in the Browser”, with a horizontal bar containing avatars for a user’s friends, and icons overlaid on those avatars to indicate the presence of new content.” The Coop product will allow Firefox users to “subscribe” to friends in the browser, bringing those friends into a sidebar. Those friends can share content and web pages with you (receive content from you, and send content to you). Adding a friend will mean getting access to a broad array of their published web content. Content will be pulled from that person’s Flickr photo feed, del.icio.us tag feed, MySpace status , YouTube favorites, etc. When you want to share content with that user, you simply drag it into their avatar (see mockups below). As Larry Dignan notes, The Coop could also have an impact on social networks that depend on constant user page refreshes to maintain pageview growth. Having status information on your friends directly in the browser could significantly lessen the need to visit those sites directly. → 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 I’m updating the list this year. Seven of the companies are still on the list. Six have dropped off to make room for new products, and I’ve added two more to round out the list to fifteen total products. Here’s the current list, in alphabetical order, of products I use every day and couldn’t live without: → 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 company here). Today at 5 am PST they will announce a number of distribution and other partnerships with major Internet companies, including YouTube, Flock, Photobucket and VideoEgg. The most interesting partnership is the deal with Flock. Piczo will distribute a Piczo-branded version of the Flock browser (see a similar deal Flock announced in July with PhotoBucket). Flock and Piczo will split search revenue generated from the browser, and users will have easy access to Piczo content. From the press release: When users download the Flock Piczo Edition browser, they will receive alerts when friends update their sites, providing an instant connection to their Piczo friends. Users will also be able to quickly and easily drag and drop content such as photos and videos into their Piczo Web page. Other features in the Flock Piczo Edition browser include access to bulk upload tools, uninterrupted login and web searching capabilities. This is good news for Flock as well. They now have access to Piczo’s 10.5 million monthly unique visitors. → 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 in their core business focused around social media. However, they have decided to de-emphasize the Shadows bookmarks product to focus on their other products.” This looks to go beyond a simple partnership expiring – Pluck has been phasing out consumer facing products for some time (they announced their RSS reader will be shut down in January 2007) in favor of its new Blogburst publishing platform. In an email exchange this evening, Pluck CEO Dave Panos told me that Blogburst is “getting 100% of our attention” and “we haven’t added any new capabilities [for Shadows] since this Spring.” That leaves Flock users with just one choice for social bookmarking: del.icio.us. Something tells me they’ll make do somehow. And Shadows, which we note seems to have a 20 second load time this evening, enters the TechCrunch DeadPool. More Flock coverage here. → 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 functionality has been stripped out, leaving Photobucket as the sole choice for photo integration. Details of the deal were not announced (in fact, the deal itself was not announced), but I assume that Flock is sharing search and other revenues streams generated by users of the browser with Photobucket. Based on unsubstantiated but largely circulated rumors around Firefox search revenue, the two companies can expect $2-3 per user per year from the partnership. Given how closely Flock has integrated with Yahoo services in the main version of their browser (del.icio.us, Flickr and Yahoo Search), I would not be surprised to see a Yahoo version of Flock sometime soon. TechCrunch posts on Photobucket are here, and Flock are here. The Photobucket version of Flock is available for download here. → 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 constant re-sizing of the IM windows to make it work right. Until the kinks are worked out (possibly via Meebo’s support of the project, which I encourage), I don’t recommend using it. But I do support the idea behind this entirely. IM should (optionally) be pulled right into the browser, where most of the action on a computer today occurs anyway. There should be no need to use a separate set of clients on the desktop for IM, or even go to Meebo’s website. Just as Flock has built a photo uploader directly into the browser (for flickr and photobucket), they should integrate IM functionality directly into it as well. More TechCrunch posts on Flock are here and Meebo are here. → 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 Flock founders – Bart Decrem, Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young – as well as investor Jason Pressman from Shasta Ventures, last night. The podcast of the discussion is up on TalkCrunch, here. Flock is a Mozilla based browser (see also Songbird, another application built on the Mozilla code base). They’ve built additional features to the core Firefox code base that make the browsing experience more seamless, including photo integration with Flickr or photobucket, social bookmarking integration with Del.icio.us or Shadows, a blogging tool, enhanced search and a RSS reader. Photos Photos stored in either Flickr or Photobucket are integrated directly into the browser experience, scrolled horizontally just above the browser window. Photos can be uploaded to these accounts by dragging them into the browser. Or, photos can be added to any web page that accepts html (a comment area on a blog, for example) by dragging the photo directly into the web page. This is the single most compelling reason (for me) that I’ve switched to using Flock – to bring my Flickr photos to the desktop. Photobucket and Flickr are currently supported. More photo services will be integrated over time (I’ve suggested that CNET’s AllYouCanUpload be supported as well, for example). Bookmarking Flock also has close integration with Del.icio.us and Shadows social bookmarking accounts. Clicking on the star button next to the address bar bookmarks the current page, and metadata such as tags can also be added. More bookmarking sites will be supported over time. Blogging, Search, RSS Flock has an integrated blogging tool, with integrated tagging, that works with most major blogging platforms. Users can switch between preview and html views. Search via the top right drop down (same location as Firefox) is set to Yahoo as a default, and an be changed to Google, Technorati, Wink, etc. (no support for MSN or Live.com search though). Beginning to type in a search query brings up a pop up box that shows recent bookmarked sites, visited sites and search results from the default search → 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 release of Performancing. They go way back. Flock even has its own hate blog (flocksucks.wordpress.com) (although this one substitutes common cruelty for actual insight and humor). My guess is Flock is suffering from a bit of backlash over its early hype. And my further guess is that Flock, backed by an impressive group of founders and investors, has a few massive tricks up its sleeve that will be announced (or leak out) sometime soon. Until now Flock has done little to fuel all the hype, and have likewise refrained from responding to the criticism. Tonight, however, Flock’s Chris Messina, supported by CEO Bart Decrem, takes issue with some of the bashing. I like this post, and not just because Chris at one point says “jack-in-the-box assclown” or calls web surfing with Firefox extensions “Firefox and Duct tape”. Chris gives a passionate, if not entirely fact laden, speach on what the hell they are trying to accomplish over at Flock. But no, see, that’s where Flock comes in. Or I don’t care, don’t call it Flock. Whatever you want, but that’s where the thing we’re building comes in. That’s why we exist, that’s why we matter, that’s what the point is. Yeah, Firefox and Duct tape, it’ll help. Sure sure. It’ll get you some of the way there. But hell, when I’m talking to someone, engaged in a conversation that threatens my very existence, or that threatens to change the way I flip my omelettes, man, I do not want my mouth to fall off at the jaw because it wasn’t tested, wasn’t built right, didn’t have a million beedy eyes boring down on it while it was being fastened to my head, making sure the stupid thing would function in the real world without needing pliers or a tireiron to get it to work right. My last post on Flock, covering its beta launch, is here. Disclaimer: I like Flock and the Flock employees. I get excited about big ideas. And I believe Flock can be a big idea. → 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 del.icio.us bookmarks and try out the blogging tool. UPDATE: Flock is now live: Flock Developer Preview is now available. Our code couldn’t wait any longer to be free! But! This preview ain’t for the faint of heart! If you’re the bleeding-edge type and don’t mind a few scrapes and busted knees from time to time, feel free to give it a whirl. We’ve got interesting ideas in this thing. We want to know what we’ve done right how we could improve. And we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us! So if a bucket of source code and developer binaries sound enticing, head over to our Developer page now. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
