Flock is dead | Hacker News Reader

Flock is dead

flock.com

176 pointsidefix56 comments

"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."

No exceptions!

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.

As 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.

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.

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

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.

Joel Spolsky pithily summarized the argument: http://akkartik.name/blog/12342736

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.

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).

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!"

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.

Good news or bad news for RockMelt?

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

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)

I would pay for RockMelt. Simply love it.

well 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.

This 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.

I'd assume vast majority is from goog.

They 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.

Well, it proves Flock _didn't_ solve a pain-point. I still would like a tool that manages all my social crap nicely.

For 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.

There 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.

In 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.

OK. 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?

I 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.

I 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/ So now is just the annoucement of something that was already dead.

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.

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

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.

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.

There must be a case study in there somewhere.

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...

Read this news using Flock 2.6.2 :(

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

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

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.

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.

yeah exactly. see: opera.

a tenth would be generous.

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

"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".

Well, Chrome is so much more than Webkit. (See: V8, among other things.) He said "mozilla", not "Gecko".

I'm sure it seemed like a great choice at the time. Remember, Flock is pretty old. The original beta came out in 2005.

I would say Mozilla/Gecko was a very good choice when the project started. Webkit itself was just being open-sourced at the time and cross platform compatibility was lacking.

No love for Opera, Flock people?

Flock was open source, so presumably they prefer open source browsers.

If that was the case I assume they would have put a link to Chromium rather than Google Chrome.

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

Amen 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.

Rendering 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%!"?

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?

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

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

Long Live the Browser

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

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