Ever since Flock was founded, we have envisioned the role of the browser to be much greater than an application that simply lets you view your favorite websites. Throughout the many versions of Flock released to the public to date, we have focused on key innovations that help you stay connected with your favorite sites, people, media and content so that you can be a happier, more informed and plugged-in person.
OpenID is an open standard for shared authentication across many sites. Simply, it’s your free, single digital identity that you can use to sign up for and log into many sites without dealing with all the paperwork. This idea has been around for a while, but only until recently has there been a broad enough adoption of both OpenID providers as well as sites supporting OpenID.
Although there has been quiet momentum and support building across the web for OpenID for some time, it was the folks at Vidoop that identified the need for the browser to play a critical role as the common denominator to best serve as the broker between a user’s OpenIDs and the increasing number of sites that support this standard for authentication. Vidoop also founded the Identity In Browser open source project (IDIB) and championed the vision for a browser that could help users discover and manage OpenID’s easily from the comfort of their own browser view.
Flock was introduced to Vidoop by the good folks at MySpace, and without a moments delay a meeting between the three parties was put together at our offices in Victoria, B.C. Our engineers all agreed on the critical role that Flock could play in aiding the adoption and management of OpenID and the result of the brainstorm was an extension we’re calling “OpenID for Flock”. This extension is a reference design for better Discovery, and Management of Identity in the browser and is Flock’s flagship contribution to the IDIB project.
The OpenID for Flock extension is available on our own extension site, as well as on the IDIB group page. We encourage everyone to watch the video above, download Flock 2.0, and install the extension to experience how gratifying it is to traverse the web and log-in to sites seamlessly with the assistance of the OpenID standard.
We’ve enjoyed our collaboration with the MySpace and Vidoop team on this project, and look forward to hearing about your thoughts and interest in getting involved with this project.
Once you’ve had a chance to experience OpenID in Flock, we’d appreciate it if you would help spread the word about Flock and OpenID. The more sites that support the OpenID standard, the better the web becomes for all of us.
-Cheers
Dan Burkhart VP of Marketing at Flock
Get Flock and Meet Your New Favorite Browser
I just had to share this video with you. Flock's CEO Shawn Hardin stopped by the TechNow show (as seen on several California NBC stations) to talk about Flock 2.0, and I think it turned out great!
What I love about this video is how they deconstruct the browser piece by piece. Flock can be intimidating at first (something we're constantly working on improving), but the way they split up the features is a fantastic way to introduce them.
Also, I think that's probably the coolest that Shawn's name has ever looked.
Evan Hamilton
Community Ambassador evan at flock dot com
I want to clarify Flock's intentions and the new direction of the Flock extensions page, extensions.flock.com (EFC).
We haven't stopped hosting extensions, we've just simplified the back-end submission process, and content that we host. One of the great bonuses of this is our new ability to host Flock themes.
Flock still embraces extensions and themes, but we will leverage Mozilla's secure back-end hosting environment by encouraging you to get extensions from addons.mozilla.org. We’ll be dedicating our resources to responding to your needs and adding new and exciting capabilities onto the Flock browser.
The broad majority of Firefox extensions have always worked in Flock. Most Flockstars are aware of this and do not visit EFC for their extension needs. With the shift in focus to content that is Flock-specific, EFC now serves the niche that addons.mozilla.org does not: we provide extensions that enhance the many specific features that are unique to Flock.
Almost all of the developers that have their extensions removed from EFC had their extensions hosted on addons.mozilla.orgalready. We continue to support development of extensions for Flock and Firefox, and the developers who have interacted with EFC in the past continue to talk with us about the future of extensions for Flock. New developers are encouraged to check out our documentation and join us on IRC.
I hope this clarifies our position. You can still have all the feature benefits of Flock and take advantage of available Firefox extensions.
Community feedback is of the utmost importance to us and will always guide the development of Flock, our website, our extensions and our company. As always, I welcome your comments and emails.
Flock'n'roll,
Evan Hamilton Community Ambassador evan at flock dot com
Less than a year after the initial release of Flock 1.0, we are proud to release Flock 2.0. Flock 2.0 has been through three beta cycles, enjoyed tremendous feedback from our community of users and is a significant step forward in capability and quality. And, this final release of Flock 2.0 has some great new capabilities that have not been made available in any prior 2.0 beta release. Let me take a moment to tell you what to expect in Flock 2.0.
Flock 2.0 is built on the latest Firefox 3 technology from Mozilla, so you’ll find it to be snappy, safe and easier to use. Flock 2.0 also comes with some great new features not found in any other browser today.
First of all, we’re very pleased to announce that we’ve added MySpace as a major new addition to our suite of 23 other popular services integrated within Flock. MySpace was the #1 most requested service from our community. Now MySpace lovers can stay up to date with their MySpace friends and activities no matter where they are on the web. MySpace users will also find that Flock offers the easiest way to upload photos, insert photos and videos in MySpace comment fields and share most any web content by simply dragging and dropping it into the Flock People sidebar.
Flock 2 also incorporates Media RSS (MRSS) detection capability so that you can subscribe to media streams being made available by websites, even if the site isn’t one of the 23 integrated with Flock. Once you’ve subscribed to a media stream via Media RSS, you will be notified about the arrival of new photos and videos posted by your favorite sites and they will flow right into your MyWorld page in Flock, so you never miss out on updates to your favorite media streams. We’ll go into this great new capability in depth in a later blog post.
For the first time, we are also making themes available for Flock 2. Check out extensions.flock.com and install a theme to customize the look of Flock. We’re shipping today with two new themes, and will be adding many more over the coming weeks and months.
If you’re already a Flock user – thank you! And, get ready for the best version of Flock ever! If you are new to Flock, give Flock 2.0 a test drive and discover what users from 165 countries and territories all around the world already know – with Flock you will rock the web! With the latest Firefox 3 architecture under the hood, you’ve now got the latest technology with the most innovative features available in any browser today. If you’ve been using the 2.0 beta, we highly recommend you upgrade…there’s a lot in this release that you haven’t seen yet.
Check it out and let us know what you think. Your feedback has been essential in developing Flock 2, and we have been growing with the strong global support of satisfied Flockstars everywhere who have been telling their friends: “get ready to meet your new favorite browser”.
-Cheers
Shawn Hardin, Chief Flockstar
shawn at Flock dot com
Flock isn't about technology. Flock is about a feeling.
While the technology powers Flock, the reason you and I love this browser is because it makes the web fun and easy again. Using Flock gets me excited about going online, keeps me in better contact with my friends, and makes my day easier.
With the new look of Flock's homepage and tour, we're fully embracing this feeling. We scoured Flickr for days finding the perfect images that represented the fun, freedom, and ease of Flock. We've been all smiles viewing these pages day after day as we prepped them for launch.
Of course, nothing is permanent on the web and we're going to want to keep our homepage fresh with some new images in a few months. Which brings us to...
The Flocktography Photo Challenge!
We want to take this fun, relaxed feeling even farther and put YOUR photos on the homepage! Nobody knows the joy that is Flock better than you, and we're sure that you've got tons of photos of you and your friends that will shine on our homepage.
All you have to do is submit your photos. We'll choose the finalists, and your fellow Flockstars will vote on who will be the winners!
The winner of the Flocktography Photo Challenge will have their photo featured on our homepage, and will also receive a collection of awesome Flock swag!
Any person prominently featured in these photos should have given verbal or signed approval to be featured on flock.com...which means you shouldn't include a celebrity or musician photo unless you can get their approval.
Winning the Challenge
A group of qualified folks at Flock will choose the finalists for the Flocktography photo challenge. Finalists will be called out in a discussion thread on the Flocktography Flickr Group. At that point we'll let you know how YOU can vote for the winners.
Obviously the rules are a little loose for this first contest as we feel it out, but we fully hope to do this again...hopefully with more organization, more submissions, and bigger prizes!
Please spread the word about this contest to all your awesome photographer friends (who, of course, you've already turned into Flockstars) so we can have a really awesome set of submissions.
We can't wait to see what you all come up with!
Flock'n'roll,
Evan Hamilton
Community Ambassador evan at flock dot com
While we're still hard at work pushing Flock 2 from beta towards release, we are taking a moment to provide you with Flock 1.2.5.
Flock puts you at the center of the action, with all your tools and services orbiting around you. It's a lot of work to string all these things together, and occasionally things break. This has been the case with Twitter and Facebook in recent days, as they have both changed elements of their back-end (Facebook with a new design, Twitter with their feeds). You may have noticed issues posting your status to Facebook from the People Sidebar or getting recent friend updates from Twitter in the sidebar. These have been fixed in Flock 1.2.5, which is available now from http://www.flock.com. Auto-updates will go out next week.
Enjoy, and please continue to provide the great and timely feedback that allows us to keep Flock in tip top shape!
Evan Hamilton Community Ambassador evan at flock dot com
Like most companies, we keep a close eye on what is driving traffic to our website. The changes are fascinating to watch week to week...small blog posts end up sending solid chunks of traffic, large articles sometimes send surprisingly little, and occasionally very interesting items pop out at us.
About two months ago we started seeing major traffic from a new website: www.ThirtyDayChallenge2008.com. We took a look at the site and discovered two interesting things:
1) They're recommending that everyone taking The Challenge use Flock as their primary browser.
2) They have a really cool thing going.
The Thirty Day Challenge is a program in which you spend thirty days learning about internet marketing and at the end, you will have made your first buck on the web. It's a cool concept and is run in a great, no-strings-attached sort of way. These guys make their money in internet marketing, and this project is about them giving back. They've grown to be arguably the largest web-based learning program/community in just 4 years. And they recommend Flock as their browser of choice because "Flock is the best web browser or internet browser that you can download... and is endlessly customizable."
So hats off to you, Thirty Day Challenge! Thanks for the vote of confidence and good luck on your admirable mission.
Evan Hamilton
Community Ambassador evan at flock dot com
Last week an issue cropped up with the Google Toolbar and Flock 1.x. The short answer is: Google Toolbar is causing Flock 1.x to crash, so we've disabled it so you can continue to use Flock.
The long answer: This is not a matter of Google toolbar or Flock being broken: the toolbar is reading Flock 1.x's user agent string as Firefox 3, and trying to do things Flock 1.x can't do, causing a crash.
The toolbar should work just fine in the Flock 2 beta, which is based on Firefox 3. This is a great opportunity for you to grab Flock 2. Although though still in beta, the changes provided by Firefox 3 already make Flock 2.0 a vastly superior product. Beta 2 has largely been found to be stable, so making the switch is more likely to improve your browsing experience than hurt it. You can download it and find more information at http://www.flock.com/beta/download
Update: If you've installed Flock 2.0 Beta 2 on Windows and are still having issues with Google Toolbar, the following steps may help:
1. Uninstall the Google Toolbar.
2. Go to C:/Documents&Settings/[your username]/Application Data/Flock/Browser/Profiles/[profile folder...will be a series of numbers and letters]
3. Remove the blocklist.xml file
4. Install the Toolbar the next time you start Flock. Keep in mind that this will only work on the 2.0 Beta.
If you are on another operating system and would like similar instructions to accomplish this task, please email me directly at the email address listed below.
Evan Hamilton Community Ambassador evan at flock dot com
As many of you Facebook users may know, Facebook is in the process of rolling out some pretty dramatic changes to their website. They have been kind enough to make most of their changes available prior to
release for testing, but of course some things change along the way. Fortunately, to make your experience with transitioning to the new pages as seamless as possible, we've been able to make several updates to Flock before the new design is even generally available.
Nevertheless, we know of two issues with the new Facebook that we're still actively working to address. The first is that you can't update your Facebook status through Flock's people sidebar when using the new Facebook. Secondly, we're in the process of tweaking how Flock's drag-n-drop works with Facebook's overhaul of their Wall feature.
We hope to have fixes rolled out in the next week or so. Thanks in advance for your patience and keep on Flocking!
We’ve got a fun product to tell you about. Today, Flock launched its latest product that is geared towards people who are passionate about keeping up with Fashion, Entertainment and Lifestyle trends. Flock’s ‘Gloss Edition’ is the world’s first fashion and entertainment browser designed to help people keep up with the latest fashion trends and celebrity lifestyle scoop (o.k. gossip).
We’ve put together a bundle of the best sources on the Web to bring you your daily dose of fashion inspiration, celebrity dish, and trends by including over 35 leading content providers and partners, from Glam, PopSugar, InStyle, ThisNext, DesignerApparel, AllTop and others. The best part about it is that all of this information comes to you, and is updated immediately as news and images are published. You’ll never miss a beat and people will wonder how you stay on top of it all.
We’ve also worked with a great panel of women to design a theme for the Gloss Edition of Flock that is pink, ‘soft’, fun and well suited for the fashionistas’ never-ending pursuit of stylish individuality.
We had fun building the Gloss Edition and we hope you have fun with the experience that it delivers. Check it out, and please don’t keep it a secret. Tell your friends about Flock.com/gloss.
-Cheers
Dan Burkhart
Vice President, Marketing
Dan at flock dot com
