

Flock is dead - idefix
http://www.flock.com/

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lallysingh
"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
No exceptions!

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cageface
Sorry 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.

~~~
younata
A 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
The CEO's laptop wasn't wiped clean before being thrown out? What else did you
find on that machine?

~~~
younata
I 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.

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codeup
Even 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.

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k-mcgrady
I 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
I 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!"

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betterlabs
Sad 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.

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Hipchan
Good news or bad news for RockMelt?

~~~
ryanglasgow
Bad. It proves RockMelt doesn't solve a pain-point.

~~~
gordonguthrie
I 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
I would pay for RockMelt. Simply love it.

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kingsley_20
Surprised 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
They recommended a platform rather than an alternative browser. Flock was
initially built on Firefox and it later switched to Chrome.

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Brandon0
Interesting 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.

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michaelpinto
The 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.

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petervandijck
There must be a case study in there somewhere.

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anotherjesse
It 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-
some...](http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2005/12/29/wanted-to-destroy-something-
beautiful/)

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sharjeel
Read this news using Flock 2.6.2 :(

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ericmsimons
I've used Flock since version 0.7. Makes me sad to see a product I loved for
five years die :(

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brackin
Flock had deeper integration and less uselessness than rockmelt in my opinion.

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vonsydov
Working 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
Sure, 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.

~~~
ceejayoz
Precisely. Chrome got advertised on the Google.com homepage. You can't buy an
ad that effective, anywhere.

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golgo13
No love for Opera, Flock people?

~~~
Androsynth
Zynga is a web development company. They have no love for browser
fragmentation; it means multiple environments they have to develop and test
for.

~~~
android2
Ahem."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?

~~~
Androsynth
thats true for flock, but i was replying to the Opera comment.

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farrokhi
wasn't this obvious from the beginning? And the same would happen to RockMelt
as well.

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nsfmc
Long Live the Browser

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simonhamp
Wait, there was another browser based on Mozilla that then moved to Webkit
that then died? Who knew?

