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.

-Cheers

Dan Burkhart
Vice President of Marketing

dan 'at' flock.com

While we often think of social media as a way to connect with our broad circle of friends, its influence has gone beyond the bounds of entertainment and communication to truly democratize information and to transform “readers” and “consumers” into publishers. Flock celebrates the diversity of human self-expression by making it simple to participate, publish and “write to the web” from your browser.

On May 4th and 5th, leading human rights advocates, journalists, and scientists will convene at The Soul of the New Machine conference being held on the U.C. Berkeley campus.  The conference will look at how technology can empower human rights around the world. Conference participants will explore how new developments in science and technology can be applied to human rights evidence gathering and analysis, advocacy, and outreach. The conference participants will learn about the latest advancements in mobile technologies and new media and how these systems have already been applied to expose war crimes and other serious violations of human rights and to disseminate this information in real time throughout the world.

Flock is a proud sponsor of this event. Flock’s users reside in 192 countries and territories around the world. This diverse global community has collectively engaged in more than 400,000,000 social actions including blog posts, uploaded photos, shared images, video and information content along with a myriad of communications and people connections.

How can Flock help empower human rights? By helping our users to document their reality, expose their truth, advocate change and raise their voice! The team at Flock salutes its users who are active all around the world shaping their online experience and their community every day.  We want to learn about your personal story. Let us know how Flock empowers your social action for social good. Please email your story to makingadifference at flock dot com.

If you’d like to learn more about getting involved and/or attending The Soul of the New Machine conference, go to www.newmachineconference.org. Those who are not able to attend in person can watch live video streaming and blogging of conference events on the conference site starting May 4th.

Knowledge and awareness are the important first steps in this journey.  We hope you’ll join us.

Shawn Hardin
CEO Flock

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

Hello all,

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!

Our mission is all about you!

-Dan Burkhart

VP of Marketing
dan at flock dot com

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.

As I'm sure you've noticed, the developers here at Flock are not ones to stand still very long. We're proud to announce that today, Flock's 1.2 public beta release is available on our site. With this latest release, Flock has integrated Digg, Pownce and AOL Mail into the browser, making it easier than ever for Flock users to stay connected with their friends and favorite services on the Web.

Let me start with Digg. What's not to love about Digg? They pioneered the whole category of social news and have done an incredible job of making news entertaining and engaging for everyone. Fortunately for all of us, the folks at Digg have made news consumption cool for an entire generation of people. We like what they've done so much that we made sure you can take Digg with you wherever you are on the Web by using Flock. Flock's People sidebar plugs right into Digg so that you can always check out the stories that your friends have Dugg and easily share with them from anywhere on the web. You can also post your discoveries to Digg easily by using your sidebar or the Diggman icon next to the address bar in Flock. We're all really excited about the Digg integration and look forward to hearing your comments.

But that's not all! We've also integrated Pownce into this beta release. Pownce is a service that "allows you to send stuff to your friends," such as music, photos, videos, messages and links. Pownce is another highly useful service which appears as a 'People' service in Flock. Pownce and Flock fit very nicely together, because we share the belief that connecting and sharing with your friends keeps things much more interesting. We're very happy about the addition of Pownce and hope that you enjoy their service as much as we do.

Rounding out this release, we've also added AOL Mail to Flock's existing webmail options.

We couldn't be happier about the continuing evolution of newly added services into the Flock experience and honestly couldn't have asked for a nicer group of folks to work with across the board.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this latest beta release. Please send us your thoughts and comments to our feedback page.

Cheers and Enjoy!

-Dan Burkhart

VP of Marketing

dan at flock dot com

Wow. We honestly didn't prepare a speech for this event...

A few weeks back, Flock was humbled to have been nominated amongst such esteemed heavyweights as Facebook, Bebo, Ning and ChangeEverything.ca for the annual Webby Awards in the Social Networking category. Late last night, we were alerted that Flock won the Webby Award for this incredibly competitive category. For a 40 person company, filled with passionate individuals who have been working late nights and straight through weekends, this is a very pleasant, unexpected, and flattering surprise!

This year marked the 12th annual Webby Awards ceremony. They received over 10,000 nominations from 60+ countries worldwide. The Webbys have long been recognized as a very special acknowledgement of the companies that are leading in key areas of excellence and innovation. Past Webby Award winners have included: Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo!, iTunes, Google, NPR, Salon Magazine, Evite, Meetup, Wikipedia, Flickr, PBS, and The Onion.

We are delighted about receiving this prestigious award, and would also like to congratulate Facebook for winning the People's Voice award within the same category. We're very close with the good folks over at Facebook and always appreciate what good partners they have been to Flock.

As always, we continue to be grateful to the millions of users around the world who have downloaded Flock, and to those that continue to champion Flock as a fun, fresh and innovative alternative to conventional browsers.

Thanks to the Judges of the Webby Awards, as well as our own Community of Flockstars for making the first third of 2008 a wild success.

-Cheers!

Dan Burkhart

Vice President, Marketing

dan at flock dot com

Hey Flockstars,

I was sitting in the weekly Flock Staff Meeting today, and I couldn't help but mention to the team: "our community is awesome!"

I feel this way all the time, but the reason I had to specifically call it out this week is because you all have been incredibly supportive and helpful during the short sidebar outage (two Flockstars even provided their Facebook login info to help us track it down).

Minutes later, while trying to digest some intense staff meeting pasta, I ran across the awesometacular Gary Vaynerchuck's video about "Good People Day 08".  He is always an inspiring guy, but he is positively bursting about GPD08, for good reason: there are few better feelings than recognizing and thanking good people in your life.

With that in mind, Flock would like to officially hand our Good People Day '08 thumbs up to you, our fantastic community.

There is a reason we affectionately refer to those who use Flock as Flockstars.  You folks rock.  You are our stars.  Because of you, we are able to continue having a blast making this product we LOVE.  Because of your constant feedback, we are able to make Flock better and better in a way we never could entirely through internal brainstorming.

Most importantly, because of your outspoken love for Flock, your ecstatic word-of-mouth, your blog posts, your Twittering, your VOICE, we are still here building an amazing browser that we care about just as much as you do.

Thank you.

Keep on spreading the word and we'll keep making this thing for you.

Now it's your turn...head out into the world and thank the good people in your lives.

Flock'n'roll,

Evan Hamilton
Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

It wasn’t that long ago when people were buzzing about the (then) whiz kid, Marc Andreessen, and his amazing Mosaic browser, which later resulted in the explosive growth and meteoric rise  of the Netscape browser. Netscape not only brought the Internet to the masses, but it played a role in changing the world. It goes without saying that the innovation was too important to go unnoticed.

That same spirit of innovation that brought the original Netscape browser to 90% of our desktops, and ultimately the open-source Mozilla Project.  This started the populist movement inspiring developers from around the world to contribute code for the collective call-to-action of out-innovating its formidable competitor. Somewhere between the punk-rock appeal of the Boston Tea Party, and the socialist ideal of thousands of developers connected by a desire to work together to build a superior product, the Open Source movement flourished better than ever before. With AOL’s support, the Mozilla Project became the Mozilla Foundation, and Firefox became the rallying cry for users seeking a more secure, better performing, innovative browser built by the people, for the people.

Our charter here at Flock has been made possible in part by coupling the same innovative spirit that pioneering Netscape developers used to bring browsing to the masses, with the foundation of shared technology that Mozilla’s Open Source charter generously makes available to us. We have been invigorated by the daily emails and positive comments we receive from our users, and feel confident that Flock is playing an important role of keeping the spirit of innovative browser evolution alive and well.

With the decision to cease ongoing support of the Netscape browser, we are honored to have the support and endorsement of AOL and Netscape, who have introduced Flock to millions of loyal Netscape users as AOL sunsets ongoing support for the Netscape products in the field. Tom Drapeau  from Netscape has been instrumental in helping increase awareness of the Flock browser, and by doing so has introduced a global audience of people to the unique experience that only the Flock browser delivers.

Flock is designed to support and enhance the way that we use the web today. We appreciate Tom’s assistance in helping get the word out, and encourage you to be a champion of innovation by telling your friends about your experience with Flock as well. If you like the idea of people working late nights to deliver a free product to you, so that you can get more enjoyment out of your daily web experience, please lend a hand.

Netscape ruled, and now Flock rocks! We’re committed to keeping the Netscape’s original spirit of innovation alive and well.

-Many Thanks

Dan Burkhart

VP of Marketing
dan at flock dot com