"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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
