Catalan, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified), English (US, Australian, British, Canadian), Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal + African Portuguese Speaking Countries and Brazil), Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Latin American and Spain)
Support for Flock was discontinued in April 2011.[9][10]
History
Flock was the successor to Round Two, who raised money from
Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, Shasta Ventures and other
angel investors.
Bart Decrem and
Geoffrey Arone co-founded the company.[11] Flock raised $15 million in a fourth round of funding led by
Fidelity Ventures on May 22, 2008, for an estimated total of $30 million, according to CNET. The company's previous investors, Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, and Shasta Ventures, also participated in the round.[12]
In January 2011, Flock Inc. was acquired by
Zynga.[13] The browser has been discontinued, with support ending April 26, 2011.[14]
Features
Flock 2.5 integrated social networking and media services including
MySpace,[15]Facebook,
YouTube,
Twitter,
Flickr,
Blogger,
Gmail,
Yahoo! Mail, etc.[16] When
logging into any of the supported social services, Flock could track updates from friends: profiles, uploaded photos, and more. Flock 2.5 added
Twitter Search functionality, multi-casting of status updates to multiple services, and the introduction of
instant messaging via
Facebook Chat in the browser.
Other features include:
Native
sharing of text, links, photos and videos[17]
A "Media Bar" showing preview of online videos and photos as well as subscription to photo and video feeds[8][18]
A blog editor and reader, allowing direct posting into any designated blog[20]
A
Webkit-mail component allowing users to check supported
web-based email off site, compose new messages, and
drag-and-drop pictures and videos from the "Media Bar" or webclipboard into a new email message[21]
CNET gave the Mac OS X version of Flock 1.0 the title of "Best Mac Software of 2007".[29]PC World'sHarry McCracken reviewed Flock as his "New Favorite Web Browser".[30]
In February 2008,
AOL announced that it would discontinue support for the
Netscape browser, and recommended Flock and
Firefox as alternative browsers to its userbase of
Netscape 9 users.[31] For the Netscape 8 userbase,
AOL recommended only the Flock browser to its users.[32] In March 2008, Flock announced that they had seen "nearly 3 million downloads" and a 135% increase in active users in the first two months of 2008. They also announced "more than 70 percent of Flock users making it their default browser of choice".[33]
In May 2008, Flock won the Social Networking category of the
Webby Awards.[34][35] Flock was nominated for this award along with
Facebook,
Bebo and
Ning.
When Flock's discontinuation was announced in April 2011, reviewer Joey Sneddon of OMG! Ubuntu! offered the analysis: "Whether this was down to poor implementation design wise (one needs only glance at '
Rockmelt' for an example of a social browser done right) or just general apathy towards having alerts from twitter, flickr, facebook, digg et al. in your face all of the time is moot: Flock has flocked off and for all its innovation it never quite lived up to its own hype."[9]
Awards
Upon exiting beta, Flock won a number of awards:[23]