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 it’s users are bookmarks, blogging and a RSS reader. Bookmarks They’ve dropped their propreitary bookmarking engine and have replaced it with del.icio.us. I have a ton of del.icio.us bookmarks – thousands – and it took a while for the browser to chug through them all during the import procedure. But it did, and I now have one hell of an interface into my favorite bookmarking service. Since Flock supports tabbed browsing, I can keep bookmarks open in a separate tab and refer back whenever. Partnering with Del.icio.us is brilliant. I do not know if they have plans to integrate with other social bookmarking sites, but I imagine it would be fairly simple for them to do. Blogging The blogging tool was, and remains, absolutely the best I’ve seen. This tool brings flickr pictures directly into the blog tool, allowing simple drag and drop into the post. It’s dual-pane, with both wysiwyg and html interfaces (I actually preferred the old toggle method of changing from html to wysiwyg, but I’m not complaining). Setup is very simple. It just works. RSS Reader Flock also has a built in RSS reader that is both dead simple to use and yet powerful enough for heavy users. A simple drop down box can be accessed for any page that allows you to grab the feed for the page you are currently on, and add it to an existing or newly created folder. Feeds can be tagged, and the viewer allows for expanded or collapsed feed viewing. There are some speed issues with this version, 0.5, but in my opinion it has more than enough features to convince web users by the millions to switch from their default browser and go with Flock. Let’s launch this thing! → 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. KnowNow Ron Rasmussen talked about KnowNow, an interesting RSS-based alert system (they call it “elerts”). I’d like to understand this one better and am hoping to sit down with Ron this week. Orb Ian McCarthy gave us a tantalizing presentation on Orb, which allows you to stream content from your home computer to any wifi device without the need for any hardware. It works extremely well for video, photos, etc. He even pulled up a video cam in his living room and used Orb to turn the light on. Cool. It’s PC only right now though. Wink Michael Tanne took the password protections off Wink today so we could finally get a look. Wink is “people powered search” and methinks they are on to something powerful. They take basic search results and allow people to tag and rank them to create a much better result set. They’ve called their technology “tagrank”. Damnit, Michael, answer my emails and give me an interview tomorrow. Allpeers Matthew Gertner presented on allpeers, an open platform to develop applications on firefox. Allpeers is in private beta currently. Flock Bart Decrem gave a Flock demo. What more can I say about Flock? I love it in a way that isn’t natural. If they could find a way to integrate Pandora direclty into the Flock browser, I’d never leave my computer again. But seriously, I’ve got my hands on the new version and will do a full profile this week. PubSub Founder Bob Wyman spoke about PubSub, structured blogging and their new LinkRanks product, which we wrote about here. More on PubSub, our favorite prospective search engine, here. → 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 even slicker than it was before, with incredibly easy flickr integration, blog editing (dual pane with code/wysiwyg viewers) and other features. Bookmarks are now integrated with del.icio.us, which just makes so much more sense than their original idea of creating a separate social bookmarking product. Flock is looking like a very powerful and very beautiful product. Flock Offices The Flock offices are literally in a garage off of University Ave in Palo Alto. Most people were awake and coding when we stopped by in the early afternoon. Andy Smith, pictured left, was the lone exception. Garage, sleeping engineers, cases of Red Bull…a true startup is a wonderful thing. Business Week Essay Make sure you read Rob Hof’s Flock essay on Business Week. It’s…very complete. → 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 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. → 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 the browsing experience: social bookmarking and a wysiwyg blog writing tool. Flock was originally called Round Two and raised money (reportedly around $1 million) from Bessemer Venture Partners. For more on the fundraising and early reports, see Om Malik and SiliconBeat. We got our first look at Flock at Bar Camp last weekend – Andy Smith and Chris Messina gave a great demo. Our beta invitation came that weekend as well. Flock should be launching publicly sometime in September. They have windows, mac and linux versions of their browser already. Social Bookmarking Flock has integrated del.icio.us-type features right into the browser. When you are on a page you would like to bookmark, simply press a “+” button on the top left of the toolbar and the page is automatically included in your bookmark area (called your “breadcrumbs”). You can also tag bookmarks, of course. Additional features include your “watchlist” (people who’s bookmarks you would like to monitor), and “groups” (basically, defined groups of flockers linking to this category). Breadcrumbs, Watchlists and Groups all have RSS feeds (of course). Blogging Tool This is pure magic. We’ve tested most blogging tools out there, including qumana (the best in our opinion – profiled here and here), blogjet (Jeff Clavier likes this one) and others. All of these requre a download and allow offline drafting and wysiwyg functionality. I have to say I think Flock blows them all away. I’m dying to show a screen shot, but Flock has asked it’s beta testers not to (so ignore the very, very small screen shot above). To show this right now would be pushing the limits of their trust, so I won’t. But it rocks. Setup was very easy (I tested it with my personal blog). It has functionality for editing posts (even posts not created with Flock), quick toggle between preview and viewing the actual code, and, the best feature in my opinion, the ability to simply drag flickr photos direclty into the post and manipulate them. They also allow quick and easy technorati tagging. Wow. → Read More
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