Flock is dead

lallysingh 15 years ago |

"The Flock team joined Zynga in January, 2011 and is now working to assist Zynga in achieving their goal of building the most fun, social games available to anyone, anytime -- on any platform."

garagebander 15 years ago | |

No exceptions!

cageface 15 years ago |

Sorry to hear this, but I think that the customized browser is basically DOA. It's hard enough to get people to update their main browser as it is. Better to build whatever you have in mind within a conventional browser.

spitfire 15 years ago | |

As an end user technology it was always DOA except in very nerdy niche's. As a delivery technology I think we'll see it around for a long time to come. Users clamour for "native" apps, this is a cheap (fake) way to give it to them.

younata 15 years ago | |

A few years ago, I managed to inherit some laptops that were being thrown out by the company my father was working for at the time.

One of them, apparently, used to be used by the CEO, and had Flock installed on it. This was my first introduction to the browser.

MichaelApproved 15 years ago | | |

The CEO's laptop wasn't wiped clean before being thrown out? What else did you find on that machine?

younata 15 years ago | | |

I didn't really find anything on it. Nothing that could cause the company any damage. I don't really remember because one of the first things I did was to throw Ubuntu on it.

akkartik 15 years ago | |

Joel Spolsky pithily summarized the argument: http://akkartik.name/blog/12342736

codeup 15 years ago |

Even though most may disagree: Am I the only one who doesn't shed any tears over this news?

A dedicated browser for social networking like Flock always seemed superfluous to me. The recommendations of the Flock project point at this: use other free browsers (preferably FF) with the appropriate extensions.

k-mcgrady 15 years ago |

I always liked the idea behind Flock but the UI was too cluttered and confusing every time I used it. Definitely too confusing for any regular user to be able to use it effectively (and therefore near impossible for it to ever gain as much traction as the 'big' browsers - even now when social is huge).

isani 15 years ago | |

I have to agree with you. When it comes to design, Flock was the anti-Chrome: a huge number of sidebars and tiny icons, all screaming "Look at me!"

betterlabs 15 years ago |

Sad but I am not surprised. Its incremental value was always questionable and I never understood why they thought they could build a successful browser based on niche features that only a tiny segment of the online population would want. It would be interesting to see what happens to RockMelt.

Hipchan 15 years ago |

Good news or bad news for RockMelt?

dudurocha 15 years ago | |

I think its bad news. If Zynga, the biggest maker of social games do not want a social browser, maybe this means something. Or not... See when Zynga aquired the Flock team, the rumors where that they want to get the senior team of flock, and make them work for zynga. http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/05/zynga-flock/ So now is just the annoucement of something that was already dead.

ryanglasgow 15 years ago | |

Bad. It proves RockMelt doesn't solve a pain-point.

Uhhrrr 15 years ago | | |

Well, it proves Flock _didn't_ solve a pain-point. I still would like a tool that manages all my social crap nicely.

flyosity 15 years ago | | |

For normal people there's already a tool that does that: Facebook.com. Facebook is the Internet for a huge % of Internet users. I don't even think there is a pain-point.

1337p337 15 years ago | | |

There certainly are a few (at least) pain points with Facebook, even for "normal" users. Spam, for one. Something that makes it a little more accessible could take off, but a competing browser may not solve the pain points.

generalk 15 years ago | | |

In all seriousness, what would that tool do? There may be a market for an app that will allow you to consume/manage your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc, from one central location.

Uhhrrr 15 years ago | | |

OK. In all seriousness, my personal preference is a tool that would a)let me tag every connection, feed, and post arbitrarily, b)display the most common connections/posts/tags/posts-from-connection-tagged-x easily, c) let me specify tag groupings via drag-and-drop and command-line regex, d) handle all logins without jacking my privacy.

I'll pay you zero dollars for it, but I'll let you show me relevant ads on alternate Thursday. You in?

djjose 15 years ago | | |

I just don't see this as a viable business (big enough market or a market sustainable by charging a large enough margin). It'd probably be a fun project to take on at one of the Hack-Weekend type events.

gordonguthrie 15 years ago | | |

I like RockMelt - I tried Flock but it did nothing for me...

Does RockMelt have a business model? dunno. But RockMelt solves the pain of twitter/facebook/linkedin fire hoses (for me)

experimental 15 years ago | | |

They collect a lot of personal information and considering Marc Andreessen is on the board of Facebook I won't trust a browser that has questionable practises like Facebook. Regardless there are addons which do what RockMelt does. The UI also is off, even if someone doesn't realise it. It is behind in updates so not good for security reasons.

ThomPete 15 years ago | | |

I would pay for RockMelt. Simply love it.

brianbreslin 15 years ago | | |

well if its got a deal with google similar to mozilla's it can make a good chunk of change with commissions on searches. mozilla generates well over $100M/year from google deal.

tmitchell 15 years ago | | |

This figure appeared absurdly high to me on first glance, but Wikipedia says Mozilla earned $61.5M from search royalties in 2006. Total revenues were $104.3M in 2009, putting the estimated amount from search at around ~$90M. I don't know that that's necessarily all Google, but still an impressive sum.

brianbreslin 15 years ago | | |

I'd assume vast majority is from goog.

kingsley_20 15 years ago |

Surprised and disappointed that they don't recommend RockMelt to their users. I'm not a huge fan of either, but if they wanted to do right by their users, the least they could do is to point them to the only other social-browsing game in town.

start123 15 years ago | |

They recommended a platform rather than an alternative browser. Flock was initially built on Firefox and it later switched to Chrome.

Brandon0 15 years ago |

Interesting how they list Google Chrome before Mozilla Firefox (left to right). Did Mozilla do anything to piss off Flock?

Edit: Nevermind. I didn't realize that Flock 3.0 moved to webkit.

michaelpinto 15 years ago |

The original release of Flock was amazing back in the era when blogs were new, but sadly they seemed to unfocus after a bit of time.

petervandijck 15 years ago |

There must be a case study in there somewhere.

anotherjesse 15 years ago |

It was fun working on flock. I still work with many of the guys I met there.

"Wanted to destroy something beautiful" - http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2005/12/29/wanted-to-destroy-some...

sharjeel 15 years ago |

Read this news using Flock 2.6.2 :(

ericmsimons 15 years ago |

I've used Flock since version 0.7. Makes me sad to see a product I loved for five years die :(

brackin 15 years ago |

Flock had deeper integration and less uselessness than rockmelt in my opinion.

vonsydov 15 years ago |

Working on the mozilla source code....worst decision ever. They made chrome from scratch and its already got large number of users without any special feature.

flyosity 15 years ago | |

"They made Chrome from scratch"

They're using the WebKit rendering engine. While Chrome is a great browser, I'd hardly say it was "made from scratch".

bkudria 15 years ago | | |

Well, Chrome is so much more than Webkit. (See: V8, among other things.) He said "mozilla", not "Gecko".

pmiller2 15 years ago | |

Sure, but that was Google. If some random, unknown company made a browser just as good as Chrome, it wouldn't have gotten a tenth the users Chrome has now.

ceejayoz 15 years ago | | |

Precisely. Chrome got advertised on the Google.com homepage. You can't buy an ad that effective, anywhere.

brianbreslin 15 years ago | | |

yeah exactly. see: opera.

Mistone 15 years ago | | |

a tenth would be generous.

jawee 15 years ago | |

I would say Mozilla/Gecko was a very good choice when the project started. Webkit itself was just being open-sourced at the time and cross platform compatibility was lacking.

antidaily 15 years ago | |

I'm sure it seemed like a great choice at the time. Remember, Flock is pretty old. The original beta came out in 2005.

golgo13 15 years ago |

No love for Opera, Flock people?

windsurfer 15 years ago | |

Flock was open source, so presumably they prefer open source browsers.

rodion_89 15 years ago | | |

If that was the case I assume they would have put a link to Chromium rather than Google Chrome.

Androsynth 15 years ago | |

Zynga is a web development company. They have no love for browser fragmentation; it means multiple environments they have to develop and test for.

android2 15 years ago | | |

Ahem."use the new zyngaweb browser and earn an extra 20% Frontierville dollars." I think Zynga could induce serious (double digit) uptake onto their own browser. Once they have this kernel of user installations, where could they go next?

Androsynth 15 years ago | | |

thats true for flock, but i was replying to the Opera comment.

taylorbuley 15 years ago | | |

Amen brother. That said, since Flock was build on Webkit I don't know if there's any less fragmentation caused by Flock flying the coop.

alttab 15 years ago | | |

Rendering engine is not the same as Javascript. Lets talk IE7 javascript, vs Spidermonkey etc.

When your application's speed is largely based on Javascript performance, this level of fragmentation becomes important.

Ever use a sophisticated web app that said something like "Switching browsers could boost performance 50%!"?

farrokhi 15 years ago |

wasn't this obvious from the beginning? And the same would happen to RockMelt as well.

nsfmc 15 years ago |

Long Live the Browser

simonhamp 15 years ago |

Wait, there was another browser based on Mozilla that then moved to Webkit that then died? Who knew?