It’s been a tremendous year for Flock so far. We just hit a really nice milestone that we’d like to share with everyone. Flock just exceeded 2 million total users on Facebook. Of total Flock users, those who are active on Facebook have grown 280% in the first three quarters of 2009. We are honored to have this many people from around the world electing to make the switch to experience the social web with Flock as their browser of choice.
We appreciate Facebook, and all of its loyal fans worldwide for helping spread the word about Flock. Flock is an independent effort, and as such we are even more critically dependent on our fans to spread the word about the Flock browser. We are humbled and honored by this vote of confidence and look forward to evolving the Flock product to continually improve the web experience for our fans.
We have listened and learned from you – our invaluable community of users. And our team is busy building and is incredibly excited about delivering an even greater experience for our users in our next version of Flock 3.0, which is scheduled for release in Q1 2010. Flock 3.0 will first be made available early next year as a private beta to those users of our current release. More to come soon on this incredibly exciting project.
Earlier this year, Flock announced a specialized Eco-Edition of our browser geared towards those interested in environmental topics ranging from climate change to alternative energy, from hybrid vehicles to green design and green cuisine. As part of this release, we pledged that 10% of the proceeds generated from searches conducted in Flock’s Eco-Edition would be donated back to the environmental organization deemed most popular and fitting by the community of Eco-Edition users.
The Eco-Edition had a fantastic run, and was promoted by key partners such as TreeHugger, Grist, PlanetGreen, Ecorazzi, GroovyGreen and AllTop. We’re very appreciative for the great demonstration of support by all of these companies, and are pleased to announce the award of 10% of Flock’s Eco-Edition proceeds have been delivered to the Environmental Defense Fund (www.edf.org), by the choice of Flock Eco-Edition users.
Interestingly, people using Flock’s Eco-Edition conducted 80% more searches per user as compared to Flock’s overall population of users. This is a great testament to the fact that people can and will change their behavior when they believe that their actions will have an immediate and direct benefit to the world around them. For this, we’re grateful and honored to give to the E.D.F. and be part of initiating this great experiment.
Flock will not be able to continue supporting an Eco-specific Edition going forward, but we encourage everyone to customize their own versions of Flock to best suit their own unique assemblage of Feeds, Bookmarks, Friends and Media Streams to keep them informed about their own view of the dynamic world we live in.
Many Thanks,
Dan Burkhart
Vice President, Marketing and Business Development
Posted February 11, 2009 - 11:04am by Dan Burkhart
We’re quickly approaching the holiday that is designed to make you pause and think about the person in your life that is most deserving of a gesture of fondness. For some it’s a big deal…for others, it’s more of a device to drum up some action in their life that doesn’t currently exist. (Go get ‘em, Tiger!)
This Valentine’s Day, we’d like you to turn your friends on to the browser that helps put people together. Instead of handing off an unoriginal box of chocolates, tell the people you care about to download Flock and you’ll be turning them on to a browser that inspires people to stay connected with the friends and things they care about most in their lives. Take it a step further and offer a personal tutorial to show this person how to get their accounts set up, and voila - you’ll find that your Valentine will be impressed and amazed by what a guru you are.
Now you’ve just turned someone on to a browser that will change the way that they experience the Web, you’ve impressed them with your knowledge, and you’ve done it for free. Knowledge is a dangerous thing when you’re a bit crafty. We trust you can take it from there.
Thanks for helping to turn people on to Flock! We hope things go well. We’re always here to help.
Send us some notes to let us know how things went for you (email: flockteam at flock dot com). We always like to hear about good Flock introductions! We’ll be dropping some packages of goodies in the mail to those that make us laugh and cheer the most.
-Cheers
Dan Burkhart
V.P. of Marketing and Business Development
dan@flock.com
Ever since Flock was founded, we have envisioned the role of the browser to be much greater than an application that simply lets you view your favorite websites. Throughout the many versions of Flock released to the public to date, we have focused on key innovations that help you stay connected with your favorite sites, people, media and content so that you can be a happier, more informed and plugged-in person.
OpenID is an open standard for shared authentication across many sites. Simply, it’s your free, single digital identity that you can use to sign up for and log into many sites without dealing with all the paperwork. This idea has been around for a while, but only until recently has there been a broad enough adoption of both OpenID providers as well as sites supporting OpenID.
Although there has been quiet momentum and support building across the web for OpenID for some time, it was the folks at Vidoop that identified the need for the browser to play a critical role as the common denominator to best serve as the broker between a user’s OpenIDs and the increasing number of sites that support this standard for authentication. Vidoop also founded the Identity In Browser open source project (IDIB) and championed the vision for a browser that could help users discover and manage OpenID’s easily from the comfort of their own browser view.
Flock was introduced to Vidoop by the good folks at MySpace, and without a moments delay a meeting between the three parties was put together at our offices in Victoria, B.C. Our engineers all agreed on the critical role that Flock could play in aiding the adoption and management of OpenID and the result of the brainstorm was an extension we’re calling “OpenID for Flock”. This extension is a reference design for better Discovery, and Management of Identity in the browser and is Flock’s flagship contribution to the IDIB project.
The OpenID for Flock extension is available on our own extension site, as well as on the IDIB group page. We encourage everyone to watch the video above, download Flock 2.0, and install the extension to experience how gratifying it is to traverse the web and log-in to sites seamlessly with the assistance of the OpenID standard.
We’ve enjoyed our collaboration with the MySpace and Vidoop team on this project, and look forward to hearing about your thoughts and interest in getting involved with this project.
Once you’ve had a chance to experience OpenID in Flock, we’d appreciate it if you would help spread the word about Flock and OpenID. The more sites that support the OpenID standard, the better the web becomes for all of us.
-Cheers
Dan Burkhart VP of Marketing at Flock
Get Flock and Meet Your New Favorite Browser
We’ve got a fun product to tell you about. Today, Flock launched its latest product that is geared towards people who are passionate about keeping up with Fashion, Entertainment and Lifestyle trends. Flock’s ‘Gloss Edition’ is the world’s first fashion and entertainment browser designed to help people keep up with the latest fashion trends and celebrity lifestyle scoop (o.k. gossip).
We’ve put together a bundle of the best sources on the Web to bring you your daily dose of fashion inspiration, celebrity dish, and trends by including over 35 leading content providers and partners, from Glam, PopSugar, InStyle, ThisNext, DesignerApparel, AllTop and others. The best part about it is that all of this information comes to you, and is updated immediately as news and images are published. You’ll never miss a beat and people will wonder how you stay on top of it all.
We’ve also worked with a great panel of women to design a theme for the Gloss Edition of Flock that is pink, ‘soft’, fun and well suited for the fashionistas’ never-ending pursuit of stylish individuality.
We had fun building the Gloss Edition and we hope you have fun with the experience that it delivers. Check it out, and please don’t keep it a secret. Tell your friends about Flock.com/gloss.
-Cheers
Dan Burkhart
Vice President, Marketing
Dan at flock dot com
What if you sat down in a restaurant and the waiter asked you “…would you like that Good, Great, or UN-BE-LIEVABLE?” Of course you might ask about price, but if all options were free, of course you’d choose “UN-BE-LIEVABLE”.
That’s why we’ve been working so hard on our Flock 2 Beta, and our audience of loyal Flockstars has been growing so quickly. Everybody loves the latest improvements Mozilla’s Firefox 3 technology: much improved performance, tighter security and improved usability. However, what if you could have all of those great features AND all of the award-winning innovations that Flock offers? (That would be the integrated People, Media, WebMail, Photo Uploader, Blog Editor, Feed Reader, and more.) Today, we’re making our second beta of Flock 2 available for everyone to enjoy, and you can take your browsing experience from great…to UN-BE-LIEVABLE for free.
In this latest release of Flock 2 Beta (two) we’ve taken your feedback very much to heart and included over 175 bug fixes, and incorporated Mozilla’s latest security patch from their 3.0.1 release. Flock 2 Beta (two) is fast, even more stable and polished.
Now lets get back to the UN-BE-LIEVABLE part. Millions of people still keep their lives ‘organized’ on the Web by opening heaps of tabs. Those uninitiated to Flock often say “I don’t need anything to manage my stuff; I keep them open in tabs.” We believe this is not terribly different than ‘organizing’ your life by stacking papers all over your desk. People around the world are falling in love with Flock’s ability to help them remain connected to the variety of sites, services, and content that interests them, without stacking tabs all over their desktop. Flock keeps your world organized and brings your most important and interesting items and events to you.
Go ahead: order up the “UN-BE-LIEVABLE” version of browsing that leaves tired old conventional browsing in the dust…or, trapped under heaps of tabs.
You can get Flock 2 Beta (two) from http://www.flock.com/beta/download, where you can also find several articles detailing the improvements we’ve made.
-Enjoy
Dan Burkhart Vice President, Marketing Dan at flock dot com
The recent surge of interest for the Flock browser has given us a lot of energy to make sure that we’re making the Flock experience available for as many people as possible around the world. As with most of our feature decisions, we looked at serving the largest audiences of users first, and so it was an easy decision for us to focus on our largest non-English speaking market of Germany to deliver our first ‘deeply localized’ build of Flock. The Social Web is exploding in Germany, and so it is natural that there are many fans of Flock interested in a more authentic, truly German experience. The Flock German edition is available here.
What does this mean? Well, our custom German experience is more than just ‘skin’ deep. The Flock DE edition ships with local content, media streams and service offerings from the most popular sites in Germany. (For example: sports content from sites like Sports1.de, and bundesliga.de rather than ESPN.com. News from Spiegel.de and FinancialTimes.de instead of CNN.com). Search services deliver German search results (for example, Yahoo.de, Amazon.de, eBay.de, Wikipedia.de, etc). Social sites like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube are defaulted to return the German experience.
We’re very proud of the German experience provided in the Flock DE version. We’re also looking forward to working with our dedicated volunteer localizers worldwide to continue rolling out similarly ‘deep localizations’ for other countries going forward. We plan to upgrade the DE edition to Flock 2 (built on the same technology as Firefox 3) as soon as our Flock 2 beta cycles are completed.
If you are a German speaking Flockstar and enjoy the German Flock experience, please help us spread the word and let people know that there is a much better way to experience the Web, with Flock.
With all of the attention around the imminent release of Mozilla’s Firefox 3 technology, we’ve been beaming with enthusiasm about what’s in store for Flock fans. Last night, we pushed our public beta (one) of Flock 2 live. Flock 2 incorporates all of the latest features found in Flock’s recent public release, but it runs on the latest and greatest Firefox 3 technology from Mozilla. So now you don’t have to abandon your love affair with your new favorite browser to check out the latest performance, security and feature enhancements from Mozilla. We’ve got them all right here for you!
Flock 2 is FAST. Manages memory better, and is more secure, thanks to Mozilla’s Firefox 3 technology.
As with all beta software, you might experience some imperfections. We’ve all been running the Flock 2 beta internally for several months, gathering our notes and fixing these imperfections as they arise, but now we could really use your assistance to make Flock 2 the only choice for those that refuse to stand still, and refuse to accept a world in which their browser just browses for them.
The Flock 2 beta marks a very important watershed moment for us. And we have some amazing things planned for the remainder of the year, so please help us refine this product by running Flock 2 beta (one), and logging imperfections by using the ‘bug icon’ in the upper right of your browser.
We will make the full migration to an official release of Flock 2 as soon as possible, pending your feedback.
We’ve got fuel in our tanks, and we’re here to show the world how much they’ve been missing by using plain browsers. Get on board, and help us out by sending your comments, love, enthusiasm, and of course…by telling your friends about Flock!
The beta period for Flock’s 1.2 browser is now officially over. Although we continually juggle inbound requests for new service integrations, we couldn’t be happier about this latest release with Digg and Pownce built in. Two weeks ago, we released the Flock 1.2 beta and have since been inundated with heaps of great encouraging comments from our users. Although we’re generally not driven by an interest in feeding the vices of our users, the words ‘addicting’ and ‘addictive’ have been used more than ever in the way that we’ve seen our browser described since we integrated Digg and Pownce into the experience.
"Really like the Digg button. Far too addictive! You have a magnificent product."
Go nuts! We love it too! Now that we’ve really got things cooking for you, we’re ready to offer a peek into our next round of progress. Within the coming weeks Flock will release it’s first beta of Flock 2.0, which incorporates the Mozilla technology that powers Firefox 3. So get ready to have all of the latest performance (memory management), security and feature enhancements found in the latest Firefox 3 release along with the unique user experience innovations only delivered by the Flock browser.
If you’re finding yourselves addicted now, then we’ll be anxious to hear from you when you have the features you love, running on the latest Mozilla technology we’re all raving about.
As always, if you’ve become a convert to the Flock browser, please tell a friend to check us out and…Digg us!
-Cheers
Dan Burkhart
Vice President, Marketing
dan at flock dot com
We recently became aware that Flock was selected as one of PC World's top 100 products of 2008. This is flattering for us, and another great validation that our vision is resonating with the world. We were not only in the company of many wonderful other products and services, but we were listed as #6 on the list of 100 services.
Rather than doing some kind of chicken dance to show our jubilation for this acknowledgement, I'll simply point you to the list so that you can check out the many wonderful companies which also received this recognition. Of course, we pay close attention to the other browsers, and we are extremely humbled to be listed as the top browser by PC World.
The pace of progress here at Flock has been steady. In November of 2007, Flock launched our first commercial release with the 1.0 version of our browser. Today, we find ourselves almost half way into 2008, and we're launching our third full commercial release with the 1.2 version of our browser.
We've got some great things planned for the remainder of 2008, and look forward to continued innovation in pursuit of delighting Flock fans worldwide.
