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Zynga buys Flock
- chrisaycock 16y agoAnd who will buy RockMelt? RockYou?
- veb 16y agoI tried RockMelt and I throughly enjoyed it, but I love my simplicity of Chrome.
- petegrif 16y agoIMHO rockmelt (like flock before it) is an elaborately engineered answer to the wrong question - how do we deeply integrate social with browsing? It does indeed so integrate social media aggregation with browsing but the problem is that the implementation is so heavy on the social media that it constitutes noise whilst browsing and is therefore detrimental to the user experience.
- cap4life 16y agoWhy do you believe that this is the wrong question? Are you pointing to the fact that RockMelt, Flock, etc. are products for which there is no real market? If so, then I agree with you.
- petegrif 16y agoThat is what I mean. All products answer a question. Unsuccessful ones answer the wrong question. The question may make intellectual sense, it may be tempting - it's just wrong. So you end up with a product without a market. :)
- ja27 16y agoBarely related, but at what point does Zynga ask themselves why they need Facebook?
- fookyong 16y agoI'd like to see some discussion on this too. FWIW, Zynga serves international markets via non-Facebook channels. But I have no idea as to the percentage of overall business this represents.
- rnemo 16y agoI'd say that this acquisition might be more related to that question than you think. Zynga games will probably be accessible through Facebook for a long time to come, but the Flock acquisition may be the start of them looking for other ways to reach customers.
- cookiecaper 16y agoZynga needs Facebook. My wife would have never started playing any of Zynga's games if there were not on Facebook, and neither would most of those whom I know play these games (my mom, sisters, etc.). In fact, I expect almost all of them would _stop_ playing these games if they were taken off of Facebook. Online games much, much better than Farmville and Cityville existed for a long time before Zynga came around and none of these people played online games. Now, since it's integrated with Facebook (meaning it's easy to get to and play constantly, and has a good introduction vector) and since you can do nice little things like help your friends, Facebook denziens eat it up. It's weird.
- dtran 16y agoInteresting - why would Zynga want a social browser? Are we going to start seeing gamification in the browser? Open ten tabs to get $ in Farmville! Otherwise, this is a really expensive talent acquisition.
- tlack 16y agoI believe they want to cut Facebook out of the equation so they are not handcuffed by their restrictions and whims.
- joe_the_user 16y agoSo do you think Flock's social browser would an equivalent to Facebook? I'm doubtful but that would be interesting...
- tlack 16y agoI don't think Farmville needs Facebook to exist - it just needs a way to stay constantly connected with the player to continue the "social loop." With Facebook out of the picture they'd have much more freedom to interact with their hard core users.
- paul 16y agoI don't see a price mentioned anywhere.
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- ojbyrne 16y agoSometimes VCs force rising companies to buy declining companies in their portfolio. Though I don't see common investors in their crunchbase profile, the incestuousness of Silicon Valley cannot be underestimated. e.g. Redhat bought the wreck of Ars Digita.
- jmtulloss 16y agoWhy would you make this claim about this deal? It's completely unfounded and the obvious explanation of "their engineers are awesome" seems perfectly adequate.
- dotBen 16y ago"Sometimes".. maybe so. I don't see anything here that suggests that is the case. A more likely explanation is Flock ran out of money/gave up in competition with RockMelt - and Zynga bought up the assets instead so that everyone got something as a return, however small, rather than see the company wound up.
- ojbyrne 16y agoIsn't that the exact same thing?
- noahlt 16y agoI guess this is a great example of founders never giving up. I had forgotten that Flock existed, and would have assumed that they'd called it quits, but here they are with what appears to be a successful exit. Kudos to them!
- joshu 16y agoThe founders left a long time ago. Bart went on to do Tapulous, and Geoffrey went to Bessemer to be an EIR, then to DanceJam, and then back to Bessemer, I think?
- noahlt 16y agoAh, then my earlier comment is invalid. Thanks for the correction.
- anotherjesse 16y agoGeoffrey went to do safetyweb.com after dancejam.
- abraham 16y agoI find it fascinating that Twitter was bidding on Flock.
- tlrobinson 16y agoNo way anyone made much money on this deal with $30M funding raised. Except lawyers, perhaps.