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Flock is a discontinued web browser that specialized in providing social networking and Web 2.0 facilities built into its user interface.[4]
Earlier versions of Flock used the Gecko HTML rendering engine by Mozilla.
Version 2.6.2, released on January 27, 2011, was the last version based on Mozilla Firefox.[5][6]
Starting with version 3, Flock was based on Chromium and so used the WebKit rendering engine.[7][8]
Flock was available as a free download, and supported Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and, at one time, Linux as well.
Support for Flock was discontinued in April 2011.[9][10]
History
Flock was the successor to Round Two, who raised money from Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, Shasta Ventures and other angel investors. Bart Decrem and Geoffrey Arone co-founded the company.[11] Flock raised $15 million in a fourth round of funding led by Fidelity Ventures on May 22, 2008, for an estimated total of $30 million, according to CNET. The company's previous investors, Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, and Shasta Ventures, also participated in the round.[12]
In January 2011, Flock Inc. was acquired by Zynga.[13] The browser has been discontinued, with support ending April 26, 2011.[14]
Features
Flock 2.5 integrated social networking and media services including MySpace,[15]Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.[16] When logging into any of the supported social services, Flock could track updates from friends: profiles, uploaded photos, and more. Flock 2.5 added Twitter Search functionality, multi-casting of status updates to multiple services, and the introduction of instant messaging via Facebook Chat in the browser.
Other features include:
Native sharing of text, links, photos and videos[17]
A "Media Bar" showing preview of online videos and photos as well as subscription to photo and video feeds[8][18]
A blog editor and reader, allowing direct posting into any designated blog[20]
A Webkit-mail component allowing users to check supported web-based email off site, compose new messages, and drag-and-drop pictures and videos from the "Media Bar" or webclipboard into a new email message[21]
Support for third-party add-ons, including a number of Firefox extensions[8][22]
Ranked no. 6 on PC World's list of the 100 best products of 2008 [24][25]
In December 2007, Flock won the Mashable Open Web Awards for Applications and Widgets[26] and in March 2008, Flock won the South By Southwest[27] Web Award for Community.[28]
CNET gave the Mac OS X version of Flock 1.0 the title of "Best Mac Software of 2007".[29]PC World's Harry McCracken reviewed Flock as his "New Favorite Web Browser".[30]
In February 2008, AOL announced that it would discontinue support for the Netscape browser, and recommended Flock and Firefox as alternative browsers to its userbase of Netscape 9 users.[31] For the Netscape 8 userbase, AOL recommended only the Flock browser to its users.[32] In March 2008, Flock announced that they had seen "nearly 3 million downloads" and a 135% increase in active users in the first two months of 2008. They also announced "more than 70 percent of Flock users making it their default browser of choice".[33]
In May 2008, Flock won the Social Networking category of the Webby Awards.[34][35] Flock was nominated for this award along with Facebook, Bebo and Ning.
When Flock's discontinuation was announced in April 2011, reviewer Joey Sneddon of OMG! Ubuntu! offered the analysis: "Whether this was down to poor implementation design wise (one needs only glance at 'Rockmelt' for an example of a social browser done right) or just general apathy towards having alerts from twitter, flickr, facebook, digg et al. in your face all of the time is moot: Flock has flocked off and for all its innovation it never quite lived up to its own hype."[9]
Awards
Upon exiting beta, Flock won a number of awards:[23]
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