Development

While we're still hard at work pushing Flock 2 from beta towards release, we are taking a moment to provide you with Flock 1.2.5.

Flock puts you at the center of the action, with all your tools and services orbiting around you.  It's a lot of work to string all these things together, and occasionally things break.  This has been the case with Twitter and Facebook in recent days, as they have both changed elements of their back-end (Facebook with a new design, Twitter with their feeds).  You may have noticed issues posting your status to Facebook from the People Sidebar or getting recent friend updates from Twitter in the sidebar.  These have been fixed in Flock 1.2.5, which is available now from http://www.flock.com. Auto-updates will go out next week.

Enjoy, and please continue to provide the great and timely feedback that allows us to keep Flock in tip top shape!

Evan Hamilton
Community Ambassador
evan 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

Hey Flockstars,

Update: Flock 1.0.3, which contains the fix to the "is is" bug, is now live here on www.flock.com. Auto-updates will be activated later this week.

As you may have noticed this morning, when you input a status to Facebook with your People sidebar it adds an extra "is" (resulting in fun statuses like "Evan Hamilton is is not stuttering, really").  Additionally, all your friends will have "is is" in their status.  This is due to a Facebook API change that has created a minor but visible Flock bug.  Facebook is trying out status without the "is", to allow more freedom of status expression.

It is my sincere pleasure to announce the release of Flock version 1.0. The Social Web Browser is now available to download from www.flock.com. This event marks a significant milestone for our company. When I arrived at Flock one year ago, the primary goal I set for the company was to transform us from a great idea company into a world-class innovation and execution company. Since that time, the tremendous work from all across Flock’s expanding organization has demonstrated this team’s appetite and capability to do exactly that: we upgraded the underlying technology platform for Flock with version 0.8 in Q1 of this year, we enhanced significantly the dependability, discoverability and feature integration with version 0.9 in Q2, we released over two hundred bug fixes and feature enhancements with version 0.9.1 in Q3, and today we are launching the full release of Flock 1.0, with the integration of “people in the browser”, available as a free download for Mac, PC and Linux.

The 1.0 Social Web Browser incorporates all your friends across numerous popular social services (Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter). We hear from our 1.0 beta users every day that this product has changed the way they are engaging with and experiencing the Web. The most frequently used adjective describing this version of Flock is ‘addictive’. We take that as a real compliment, and a strong vote that Flock is onto something very special.
 
Flock 1.0 is also a platform, and you will see an expansion of the social and media services with which Flock is integrated early in the New Year, along with the formal release of our 1.0 API for developers and third parties around the world to leverage, add services and further contribute to Flock’s capabilities.

With your help, and the millions of new users we plan to serve in the year ahead, we will continue to be champions of open-standards, and strive to continually deliver unique and meaningful experiences that place the user at the center of everything, and are made possible only from within the browser.
 
We’re incredibly excited by the launch of Flock 1.0. The Flock team is both grateful and enormously proud of the overwhelmingly positive response to our 1.0 release, and I want to personally thank all of the passionate community members and Flock users who have emailed enthusiastic notes of encouragement. Your tremendous feedback fuels our desire to push the boundaries of browser innovation. We have great ambitions to continually improve and evolve Flock, and hope that we can continue to count on your passionate engagement to help us guide our course.

I welcome your comments and feedback – either here or via email (shawn at flock.com).

Thanks,

Shawn

Blogged with Flock

Hello Everyone,

As a new addition to the team here at Flock, I’d like to take a moment to share some of my first impressions with you.  This is likely my last chance to offer the candid perspective of the ‘new guy’. First of all, it’s great to be here. Let me briefly explain why.

Flock is preparing for a very important milestone in our company’s history. We are on the cusp of completing Flock 1.0, which integrates your friends from your favorite social services into the browser, paving the way for easy communication and sharing with people you care about, no matter where you are on the Web. This is by no means a modest ambition.

Nobody at Flock joined to take on modest ambitions. In this next version we’ve built a browser that integrates 15 popular services from around the Web, and succeeded in allowing them to work well with each other, which we believe to be a tremendous accomplishment. We’re quite proud of what we’ve done and look forward to hearing your impressions after you have the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the product. We’re hopeful that you too will become ‘dyed in the wool’ converts who can’t imagine browsing any other way.

In my brief tenure here at Flock, I’ve quickly arrived at a sense of great appreciation for the many elements that need to be in place in order to deliver a noteworthy and important product innovation. In most cases, there needs to be an ever-changing combination of vision, talent, focus, and flexibility (and these elements don’t naturally co-exist well together). I’ve been impressed by the incredible concentration of talent here at Flock, and how these elements have all been balanced to complete such an ambitious product vision.

Along with our excitement around the release of Flock 1.0, we’re collectively challenged and inspired by our ambitious roadmap ahead. No rest for the weary here. We’re just now scratching the surface of what we believe the Flock browser is capable of delivering.

Longfellow said, “most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.”

I think we would have liked that guy, and he clearly would be an avid Flock user.

We are now in the midst of our private beta and will be sharing a public release candidate for Flock in the coming weeks.  Flock 1.0 is on it’s final approach, and it’s well worth the wait.

-Dan

Blogged with Flock

Previously under wraps for TechCrunch40, we are now able to show you a preview of this exciting next stage of our product.  You can read our Press Release about the unveiling of Flock 1.0 at TechCrunch40 here.
Want to get your hands on it?  Visit www.flock.com/privatebeta to get a sneak peek of the new features and sign up for a private beta that we will be launching in the coming weeks.  Be one of the first to see and test drive the revolutionary next step of Flock!

Shawn

Blogged with Flock

It is my great pleasure to announce that Flock has been selected as one of the 40 hottest startup companies by TechCrunch40 (out of over 700, from more than 26 countries around the world).  The event is being held today and tomorrow in San Francisco and Flock will be in attendance to do our first public demonstration of Flock 1.0, The Social Web Browser.

Check back later today, when we will have lots of additional information to share with you...

Shawn

Blogged with Flock

I’m pleased to announce the release of Flock 0.9.1 less than 70 days after the launch of 0.9. Today's upgrade to Flock includes over two hundred bug fixes and feature enhancements. While many of these fixes and enhancements were derived from our internal QA process, many also were brought to our attention by our early 0.9 test drivers. Thank you all for your invaluable contribution in making Flock better and better!

This release is a prime example of the speed at which Flock is now developing, innovating, building, and shipping. These enhancements will further strengthen the foundation for our v1.0 release, scheduled for release later this fall.

While the complete list of improvements to Flock 0.9.1 is too large to list here, here is a highlight of key enhancements:

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback – either here or via email (shawn at flock.com).

Thanks,

Shawn

Blogged with Flock

Hey Flockstars,

We're always trying to make Flock better.  Features, options, performance, discoverability...the whole gamut.  Part of this process involves product testing: we bring in folks who have never used Flock and see what they like, what they discover, and what they don't.  It's helpful to get a fresh perspective; we use Flock all the time, so we already know where everything is.

Our latest round of product testing has been an in-depth look at how people use Flock over weeks, rather than just their first run.  We give our testers Flock and have them use it for a few weeks, reporting back every week or so.  Now that we've done this with non-Flockers, we'd like to bring some of you into the study!  Here are the details:

Hey Flockstars,

You tell us a lot of things.  I spend much of my day reading your posts on our forum and blog, reading your /feedback messages, checking out your personal blogs, or just chatting with you.  And as much as I enjoy doing this, it's not just for fun.  We're always listening to what you have to say because it's incredibly valuable.  And, we're acting on this feedback whenever possible.