Flock

» see flock.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

flock asked you to do all of your social internet inside the browser chrome. by 2005 i already had a folder of browser tabs that handled the social part on its own. msn for chat, mail and a forum in a couple of tabs, winamp running underneath. another menu bar with twitter and flickr widgets glued into it would have made the screen busier, not faster. but the idea got vc money, because vc money in 2005 was buying any product with "social" in the deck, and bart decrem and geoffrey arone put together a real company around it.

flock launched its first public version in october 2005, built on top of mozilla's gecko engine. it was a firefox fork with a sidebar that talked to facebook accounts and a media bar that pulled in your flickr stream. there was a built-in feed reader and one-click sharing that pushed posts to whatever account you had connected. the browser won a webby award in 2008 for social networking, and pc world put it on the 100 best products list. at one point it had several million downloads logged. how many of those downloads turned into daily-use sessions has never been clear.

zynga bought flock in january 2011. by then flock 3 had already been rebased onto chromium because gecko's embedded-browser story was deteriorating. zynga did not appear to have any specific plan for the browser itself. it killed support on april 26 2011, three months after the acquisition. the team got absorbed into zynga's social-game side, which was the only part of zynga the deal was really for.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

the period between 2005 and 2008 was full of products that wanted to be the homepage of your social internet. flock was one. netvibes was another. igoogle and the rest of the personalized-portal cluster were variations on the same idea. flock's pitch was that the browser itself should know your accounts so you would not have to keep going back to facebook.com or twitter.com to check them. the demo was good. the daily reality, for most people, was that the browser was the wrong place for that layer. you wanted facebook in a tab, not bolted into your back-button bar.

~ what it became ~

flock's last useful contribution was the recognition that a browser-as-social-feed-reader did not work as a category. firefox would add more native account integration in fits and starts. chrome would build a profile system that synced your accounts. eventually the whole question got resolved by the smartphone, where every social network became its own first-class app and the browser shrank into one of many icons. flock had been trying to be the thing that the home screen on a phone turned out to be. the home screen won.

~ what really happened ~

zynga's acquisition was the formal end. but flock had already been shrinking for two years. the firefox-based version 2.6.2 in january 2011 was the last release that worked on the mozilla codebase, and the chromium-based version 3 was less than three months old when zynga pulled the plug. users got a notice telling them to migrate to other browsers. the website went down. the executables stayed on download mirrors for a few years, then those went too.

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