7 ms·
Flock is dead
- petervandijck 15y agoThere must be a case study in there somewhere.
- lallysingh 15y 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 15y agoNo exceptions!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Hipchan 15y agoGood news or bad news for RockMelt?
- ryanglasgow 15y agoBad. It proves RockMelt doesn't solve a pain-point.
- gordonguthrie 15y agoI 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)
- ThomPete 15y agoI would pay for RockMelt. Simply love it.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- brianbreslin 15y agowell 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 15y agoThis 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 15y agoI'd assume vast majority is from goog.
- experimental 15y agoThey 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.
- Uhhrrr 15y agoWell, it proves Flock _didn't_ solve a pain-point. I still would like a tool that manages all my social crap nicely.
- flyosity 15y agoFor 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 15y agoThere 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 15y agoIn 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 15y agoOK. 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 15y agoI 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.
- dudurocha 15y agoI 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/ http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/05/zynga-flock/ So now is just the annoucement of something that was already dead.
- golgo13 15y agoNo love for Opera, Flock people?
- windsurfer 15y agoFlock was open source, so presumably they prefer open source browsers.
- rodion_89 15y agoIf that was the case I assume they would have put a link to Chromium rather than Google Chrome.
- Androsynth 15y agoZynga is a web development company. They have no love for browser fragmentation; it means multiple environments they have to develop and test for.
- taylorbuley 15y agoAmen 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 15y agoRendering 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%!"?
- android2 15y agoAhem."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?
- Brandon0 15y agoInteresting 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.
- anotherjesse 15y agoIt 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-something-beautiful/ http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2005/12/29/wanted-to-destroy-some...
- simonhamp 15y agoWait, there was another browser based on Mozilla that then moved to Webkit that then died? Who knew?
- k-mcgrady 15y agoI 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 15y agoI 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!"
- michaelpinto 15y agoThe 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.
- brackin 15y agoFlock had deeper integration and less uselessness than rockmelt in my opinion.
- cageface 15y agoSorry 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 15y agoAs 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 15y agoA 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 15y agoThe CEO's laptop wasn't wiped clean before being thrown out? What else did you find on that machine?
- younata 15y agoI 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 15y agoJoel Spolsky pithily summarized the argument: http://akkartik.name/blog/12342736 http://akkartik.name/blog/12342736
- vonsydov 15y agoWorking 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.
- pmiller2 15y agoSure, 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.
- brianbreslin 15y agoyeah exactly. see: opera.
- Mistone 15y agoa tenth would be generous.
- ceejayoz 15y agoPrecisely. Chrome got advertised on the Google.com homepage. You can't buy an ad that effective, anywhere.
- flyosity 15y 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 15y agoWell, Chrome is so much more than Webkit. (See: V8, among other things.) He said "mozilla", not "Gecko".
- antidaily 15y agoI'm sure it seemed like a great choice at the time. Remember, Flock is pretty old. The original beta came out in 2005.
- betterlabs 15y agoSad 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.
- ericmsimons 15y agoI've used Flock since version 0.7. Makes me sad to see a product I loved for five years die :(
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- kingsley_20 15y agoSurprised 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 15y agoThey recommended a platform rather than an alternative browser. Flock was initially built on Firefox and it later switched to Chrome.
- codeup 15y agoEven 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.
- sharjeel 15y agoRead this news using Flock 2.6.2 :(
- nsfmc 15y agoLong Live the Browser
- farrokhi 15y agowasn't this obvious from the beginning? And the same would happen to RockMelt as well.